I have heard a lot of hype about "cloud storage" and "cloud storage solutions." What are they?
Cloud Storage is defined by 3 characteristics:
A storage service delivered over a network (internet or intranet)
Economically scale capacity and performance
Easy to manage (e.g. 1 administrator managing 100s of nodes, petabyte+ scale)
A customer can use cloud storage in 2 ways:
Public Cloud Storage Service. A mid-size business (or consumer) may choose to rent storage by the month from a service provider (the service provider may have chosen to build its "public" cloud using the ParaScale Cloud Storage solution).
Private Cloud Storage Service. A larger business may want its data behind the firewall and managed by the IT team yet still want to leverage the flexibility and economics of cloud storage. In this situation the IT department may build a private cloud using technology like ParaScale's, and deliver a cloud storage service to the internal community over the corporate intranet. Remember, private or internal storage clouds do not need to be a megacloud with 100s of nodes. An internal storage cloud, with as few as 3-5 nodes, can fully realize the economies of cloud storage, and deliver ease of management and scalability.
Cloud storage just sounds like the SSP (storage service provider) of the last bubble. So what is different?
Cloud storage is also about delivering storage as a service similar to SSPs like StorageNetworks and Sanrise. However, earlier SSP providers who where delivering storage as a service ran into two problems.
The SSP's primary market (Web1.0) went away with the last bubble.
Enterprises were not ready to put their Tier 1 mission-critical data in a shared SAN located at an SSP's co-location facility.
There are several key differences between SSPs and cloud storage
Cloud storage is not about storing Tier 1 data. It is clear that enterprises are not going to be comfortable about letting critical information out of the data center for a long time.
Cloud storage is about meeting the exponential growing needs to store Tier 2/3/4 file data. The economics and scalability requirements for this dataset match well with what cloud storage delivers.
Unlike with the SSP services of old, today's cloud storage technology can be a public or private service. The architecture can sit behind an enterprise's firewall, if that is a requirement.
Other Resources to Consider
If you are looking for the technology differences between a public cloud storage and private cloud storage solution, and how these solutions differ from other offerings, visit the Cloud Storage Technology section of the library.
For white papers and audio / video guides to ParaScale, visit the ParaScale Cloud Storage section of the library.
If you are ready to download a trial of ParaScale and build a storage cloud, visit the Evaluating ParaScale section of the library.
For details on ParaScale features, visit the products pages.
For information on ParaScale solutions, visit the solutions pages.
