Cloud computing – including cloud storage – will transform the industry and become the predominant way in which IT is consumed.
That’s the prediction of Sajai Krishnan, CEO of Silicon Valley start-up ParaScale.
He said there has been a rapid heightening of interest recently in all things cloud – applications, computing and storage.
As a result enterprises are increasingly turning to cloud storage as a way to enable flexible computing power over the Internet, according to Krishnan.
"We believe the impact of cloud technologies will be transformational and cloud will be a major way by which IT is consumed as we move forward," he said.
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| Sajai Krishnan, CEO ParaScale |
Krishnan said a company could buy cloud storage – where the company builds a private or internal cloud – or rent it – where the company rents by the GB per month from a public cloud storage service provider.
Regardless of whichever method was chosen, he said the advantages of cloud storage would soon be as mainstream as the architectures that came before it, including 3-tier web applications, client/server and mainframe.
But like most emerging technology there had been some initial hesitancy towards adopting it.
Krishnan said that in 2008, many companies were wary of the risks and vulnerabilities of participating in the cloud computing model.
So despite the buzz around the technology being high, adoption was feathered.
“This all changes in 2009 – the economic downturn and the addition of private cloud solutions to complement public offerings are creating an environment that enables incremental adoption of cloud storage on a very broad scale," he said.
Krishnan said discussions with end users had shown that the overwhelming majority indicate they are considering both public and private cloud storage.
He identifies several considerations driving the adoption of storage clouds. These include:
- Building storage clouds is becoming as simple as installing a new application on your laptop. This is enabling service providers and the enterprise to embrace this technology with minimal effort.
- Cloud storage can start small and scale-up as needed. Organizations are no longer over-building to address the potential for rapid growth. Instead the drive is to put in place an architecture that is extremely flexible and that can scale on demand using commodity hardware and standard client access.
- Clouds are designed to be self-managing and don’t require heavy IT manpower. Storage tiering, provisioning, and data movement are
- time consuming tasks that are automated in cloud storage.
- Storage clouds can be tuned for specific uses or applications. For example, clouds can be tuned for archival very cost-effectively, or
- for streaming media performance.
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