I came across a useful story that compiles a number of the 2010 outlooks for the storage industry. Forrester, ESG and Symantec seem to be sharing an optimistic view, with spending to increase while customers seek ways to be more efficient. This points to increased consideration and adoption of hosted storage or Storage-as-a-Service offerings this year.
Storage-as-Service has been an established, viable offering well over the past decade. Companies have been using hosted storage services or ‘Cloud Storage’ going back to at least 1993 from service providers like LiveVault (now part of IronMountain). Like any outsourcing activity, IT organizations leverage out-of-house hosting providers to lower their capital expense as well as administrative staffing requirements. With the increased adoption of larger bandwidth connections across corporate WANs, and the continued growth in data, we can expect to see more offsite storage useage in 2010 and beyond.
Storage-as-a-Service offerings will grow in popularity from off-line archiving to online product use over the next 5 years. Currently Cloud Storage is mostly limited to offline uses where the network latency isn’t an issue, such as for video and email archiving, and we will predominantly see this type of use for Cloud storage in 2010. As network connections between enterprises and their service providers are improved along at least a few key dimensions, we will see these use cases expand to include more production-oriented data storage. Over time Cloud storage will become an alternative to nearline storage, and some service providers have been quick to launch services to begin this evolution.
However, at least three major advances in networking will be required to enable the broader growth of the Storage-as-a-Service market. Moving data over a WAN link is a major inhibitor to production storage service use. Transit acceleration will need to be a core part of the solution to improve the performance to be closer to native LAN latencies. Similarly, the availability of the connection needs to be better maintained, and more advanced techniques will need to be employed to assure more highly available connections between the datacenter and the service provider, which will also improve throughput. Finally, security for both data-in-transit and data-at-rest will need to be in place to assure that business and customer data cannot be breached, especially within multi-tenant hosted environments.
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