Through all of the hype and excitement brought on by cloud computing, the fact of the matter is that it is delivering real value to enterprises, SMBs and consumers. Companies are increasingly looking to a cloud computing environment to accelerate value in business financials; improve agility, flexibility and innovativeness; and reduce costs. Driven by the growth of cloud computing, cloud storage is quickly growing from a relatively small percentage of the overall IT market to a disruptive, sustainable and significant opportunity.
Contrary to misconceptions about its possible impact on the storage industry, cloud computing is actually quite positive for storage. It's good for the storage service providers and for the storage infrastructure suppliers. As more and more applications are developed and computing resources demanded, more storage is created. According to IDC, storage is the fastest growing cloud service, growing from 9 percent of all cloud service revenues in 2009, or $1.6 billion, to 14 percent in 2013 or over $6 billion of worldwide IT cloud services revenue. The vendors providing storage hardware, software and professional services to the cloud service providers raked in $2.9 billion in cloud storage infrastructure revenue in 2009, according to IDC.
Due to the cloud's rapid elasticity of compute resources and lower cost structure, cloud computing will drive more applications and computing demand that will result in a higher demand of storage across all enterprise storage tiers. In addition to the sheer growth of storage driven by cloud computing, there are opportunities to provide new storage device solutions that will help solve cloud data center cost challenges and operational inefficiencies.
This growth will continue as an increasing number of enterprises experience the ability to deliver more value with fewer resources while keeping up with constant change, one of the many benefits provided by cloud computing. It's most likely that this growth will primarily be focused on the private cloud build-out over the next couple of years.
The bottom line for cloud computing is that the time is now and the benefits are real.
What Is the Cloud?
The cloud is a new model for delivering and consuming IT resources, such as compute (server) resources, data storage, network bandwidth and even applications. The model includes characteristics such as on-demand, self-service; rapid elasticity; measured service (pay-as-you-use); resource pooling and broad network access.
There are three well-known cloud service types:
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), where a customer uses a service provider's application over a network
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), where a service provider's platform is used to deploy a customer-generated application to the cloud
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), where customers pay for the usage of processing, storage, network bandwidth and other IT resources
There also are four kinds of cloud deployments:
Public, which are typically mega-scale infrastructures used and shared by multiple customers
Private, which are owned or leased for use by an individual customer
Community, which is a shared infrastructure by customers who have a common interest, such as medical centers
Hybrid, which is a composition of two or more clouds
Why Do Clouds Form?
Although many surveys are being conducted to examine the perception and adoption of cloud computing, they are finding similar results. While security and integration issues are the biggest concerns, they have not dissuaded companies from adopting cloud computing. Furthermore, among those companies already using cloud computing, there is a very high satisfaction level. Seventy percent of those that are currently using clouds plan to move additional applications to the cloud within the next 12 months. Cloud computing is becoming a permanent part of the IT discussion and strategy.
So what is drawing companies to adopt clouds? Although there are many drivers, cost savings and agility are the two biggest reasons companies are adopting cloud computing. The pay-as-you-use cost model and CAPEX reductions that cloud enables are some of the top reasons that companies are adopting cloud. Also, cloud computing provides dynamic scaling to quickly provision and de-provision IT resources, which adds tremendous business value to new programs and initiatives that companies need to launch in a timely manner.
Below is a chart that breaks out the driving factors for adopting cloud computing.
Companies are deploying several categories of business applications that are driving rapid data growth and require a more dynamic storage infrastructure to accommodate this growth. Given those deployments and today's dynamic markets, companies need an IT infrastructure that is flexible and can respond quickly to changing business needs. Cloud computing provides the elasticity required to achieve their business objectives.
The big hitters in terms of applications that are being moved to the cloud include: e-mail, archiving, CRM and storage. Also, some industries are moving to the cloud faster than others. The top three industries adopting cloud computing are technology, financial services and legal/professional services.
What Makes Clouds Different?
There are fundamental design differences that make clouds different from traditional on-premise data centers. Service providers typically consider their data centers to be value- or revenue-generating assets, while a traditional on-premise data center is commonly viewed as a cost center. This difference is one of the key reasons why the two environments are architected differently. Many of the large Internet data center companies share a philosophy on architecting a cloud environment, which is based on deploying low-cost, scalable, commoditized hardware with a software layer that glues the inexpensive hardware together to create a more scalable model.
Clouds are also based upon a self-service model, multi-tenancy enabled in part by virtualization, and a high level of autonomics and homogeneity. A traditional on-premise environment is typically a heterogeneous, shared-service model with less automation, and it manages assets independently for each user or application. A cloud's deployment model is distributed, as opposed to decentralized with a client-server model. Another very important difference is that clouds are designed for failure instead of failover, which aligns well with their utilization of replication as the primary model for data protection due to its simplicity and massive scalability.
Finally, open source software and cloud computing have a symbiotic relationship. While massive data centers built on low-cost commodity hardware and virtualized operating environments provide the technical foundation for global, cloud-based services, open source software enables global, service-based business models. These differences enable clouds to achieve lower service costs through greater resource sharing, greater economies of scale, greater levels of architectural standardization, greater process optimization and automation, and the ability to modify the usage of those resources much more quickly than traditional IT environments.
Selecting the Right Storage Device for the Right Cloud Application
Applications drive the workload, reliability and performance needs of any system. Applications in cloud data centers run 24/7, have high workloads, and run in high vibration environments that require enterprise-class storage devices; e.g., hard drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs).
Enterprise-class drives are designed for a multiple drive system environment such as servers and external storage systems that operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Non-enterprise class or personal storage drives are designed for a single-drive environment and have a much lower design usage, lower duty cycle and a simpler, lighter workload. To ensure success with demanding cloud applications, it is highly recommended to use enterprise-class drives that are designed for enterprise applications that run in a cloud data center environment.
Seagate's Unified Storage architecture is well aligned with the cloud architectural approach to increase simplicity, lower costs and achieve greater scalability. Seagate's approach reduces complexity and optimizes energy efficiency and performance footprint for the data center. By simplifying around a single interface and form factor, and upon a single foundation for security, Seagate's Unified Storage approach promotes sustainability and creates a foundation of powerful, yet simple enterprise-class storage solutions for the demanding and multiple array of different applications in the data centers.
The Forecast: Growing Clouds
The cloud will continue to evolve and expand, driving more applications and more computing demand that will in turn drive more storage for the data centers, as well as more local storage.
However, the cloud will not wholly replace enterprise data centers. Many companies — primarily the small-to-mid-size businesses — will move from an internal IT model to an outsourced cloud model. Many larger enterprises, on the other hand, will have a hybrid model, utilizing the cloud for providing certain IT services while at the same time maintaining other internal IT services. Some may migrate and outsource their entire IT operations; however, many of them may choose to migrate their non-critical applications and data to the cloud but keep their critical applications and data internally, behind their firewalls.
In 2010, there will be a huge growth in mindshare toward the cloud, with widespread cloud adoption taking place in the 2012-2013 timeframe. The degree to which companies will adopt cloud services for their diverse set of applications boils down to many factors; one of the more important of these is trust. Earning this trust will take some time.
Wes Perdue
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