Christophe's Corner

I was in Orlando last week attending the Gartner ITxpo event.  HDS had a booth there, and we were grateful to have a customer, Jeffrey Papen from Peak Web Hosting, join us and speak at the event.

In the booth, we had the Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP) on display, which drew a big crowd and a lot of buzz.  I had a fun time discussing its advantages over other vendors.  Can’t resist!

But our Hitachi VSP had some competition.  If there had been a prize for the best giveaway at the expo, I am very confident we would have won.  We even had competitors stopping by to get one of these:

I am not sure as to why these were so “hot”… but they allowed us to strike up many discussions with customers and prospects alike.

Key considerations for cloud storage

Their outsourcing service offerings are for organizations that want an enterprise-level environment for their applications, and access to an experienced technical team.  I am stressing enterprise-level because it’s a pretty important point to remember for anyone who’s seriously considering buying cloud storage today.

Jeffrey did a great job of cutting through the marketing of many providers to establish a few sobering and refreshing key points:

• Traditional clouds targeting consumers completely miss the mark
• By design, clouds can’t meet enterprise business requirements for performance, security, uptime, compliance, transparency, etc
• Cloud service SLAs are “best effort”, devoid of storage guarantees
• Cloud computing is expensive — easily 3x or more the cost of dedicated managed hosting
• Clouds are designed to be accessible, not be high performance

There is a need for something else — call it an “enterprise cloud” that combines components of enterprise-class hardware to ensure meaningful SLAs, 100% uptime guarantees including maintenance windows, security and business continuity and disaster recovery.    In addition, safe Multi-tenancy, within or between companies, is a convergence requirement for efficient usage and cost tracking (charge-back).

On the subject of convergence, Jeffrey then went down the stack and provided his perspective on key trends around servers, networks and of course storage.  I personally really like his take on storage which I will close this post with:

“Managing data will become more important than storing data, as metadata trumps the value of the data itself”

And… “Intelligent Object Stores are the future to scaling ‘usable’ storage”.