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Cloud-based storage, full with pros and cons, gaining traction

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Don Peterson, Director of IT, Merced College Don Peterson,
Director of IT,
Merced College

When Merced College Director of IT Don Peterson crunched a numbers, it was impossible
not to gaunt toward cloud-based storage for server backup and information recovery. The squeeze of
new storage hardware alone to support a information final of scarcely 18,000 students, staff and faculty
at a Merced, Calif.-based establishment would cost some-more than $200,000.

A cloud storage resolution from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Zetta Inc. that was researched and
proposed by Arlis Brotner, Peterson’s network manager, started during $225 a month.

“You can see how a indication creates sense,” Peterson said. “We would have had to do a vast capital
outlay for all a hardware, all a software, all a energy to run it. A cloud
storage provider
has already invested in all that infrastructure, so they can share that with
multiple business and order a cost out.”

Consumerization of IT another motorist of cloud storage

What to store in a cloud is a review Gene Ruth, an researcher specializing in cloud storage
at Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., mostly has with clients. Typically, as during California’s Merced
College, clients are meddlesome in cloud-based storage for backup and archiving. But he’s noticing
an rising phenomenon: Where a year ago he was never asked about record syncing and sharing
capabilities, now those calls come daily. Thanks to apps like a Dropbox record hosting service,
consumers are removing gentle with online record syncing and pity services, and they expect
their IT classification to give them equal capabilities during work.

“A vast IT classification will come to me and say, ‘Our users are on Dropbox; they’re completely
outside of corporate policy, out of IT policy, and a hair is on fire, so we as an IT organization
want to residence that,’” Ruth said. “And good for them! They’re not observant they’re going to stop it,
they’re observant they’re going to offer their possess capability. That’s an important, complex
conversation, since it’s pushing a whole new resource for smoothness of files to finish user
employees.”

Ruth is blissful to see IT organizations’ zeal to respond to consumer
expectations
, because, like pushing down costs and traffic with a flourishing volume of data, it
addresses a need for IT to be manageable to changing business needs. “When a CEO walks into the
CIO’s bureau and says, ‘We need we to come adult with this capability for us to run a business,’ he
doesn’t wish to hear it’ll take 6 months and $6 million; he wants to hear ‘We’ll have that
tomorrow,’” Ruth said. “And that’s also a motivator to pierce to cloud storage, since once we have
everything worked out, that’s doable.”

–K. G.

Peterson and Brotner are among a solemnly flourishing series of craving IT leaders looking to
cloud-based storage as a probable “safe house” for data. In their new “Top 10 Storage
Predictions for Infrastructure Operations Professionals” report, analysts during Cambridge,
Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. pegged 2012 as a year cloud storage would turn a “viable
enterprise option,” interjection to softened enterprise-class services, stronger service-level agreements
and a improved bargain of that workloads it creates clarity to pierce to a public
cloud
.

The seductiveness in cloud storage solutions among craving companies is unequivocally there, said
Gene Ruth, an researcher specializing in cloud storage during Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc.
Trepidation about relocating information off-premises persists, though in a era
of “big data
,” enterprises are traffic with extensive information expansion and wish to know how
cloud-based storage can assistance them run their IT infrastructures, he said. Vendors vast and small
are responding to craving concerns.

“I feel as if a call is building where a incomparable IT organizations are removing some-more comfortable
with a thought that a infrastructure attention is building products that assistance bond inner to
external capacity,” Ruth said. “Over a subsequent few years — and some calm is compulsory here –
we’re going to see open cloud storage only turn partial and parcel with building out an IT
infrastructure.”

Embracing cloud-based storage means guileless cloud security

It’s formidable not to be seduced by cloud
pricing models
, though cold feet still tend to rise when it comes to security, Ruth said. That
was loyal for Peterson and Brotner until their possess investigate positive them their information would be
stored in some-more than one plcae and would be encrypted in movement and in storage.

“That helped, since we always worry about your information not physically being ‘here,’” Peterson
said. “It’s substantially safer in a cloud than it is here since we don’t encrypt on hoop here, but
they do in a cloud … so it only seems to me it’s safer. we wouldn’t have pronounced that before, but
now, saying this [solution], we can contend that.”

So, what are Peterson and Brotner now gentle entrusting to a cloud? Brotner pronounced that
information includes individuals’ files from home directories, spreadsheets, Word documents, Access
databases, images used between departments or within departments, SQL database backups, virtual
machine backups and email archives. IT also is looking to supplement direct-to-cache storage, that would
allow users to entrance archived information on their own, an movement that now is carried out by IT on
request.

Cloud gateways lead to brighter destiny for cloud-based storage

In an Aug 2012 report, Forrester Research researcher Andrew Reichman asserts that issues holding
back cloud-based storage solutions from broader adoption in a craving could be addressed with
cloud
gateways
.

Reichman identifies latency, doubt about accessing information opposite a WAN, problem coding
to cloud providers’ focus programming interfaces (APIs) and a risk of information leaks as
enterprise organizations’ arch cloud storage concerns. In response, a marketplace is saying a growing
number of cloud
gateway vendors
. Most gateways yield information caching for frequently accessed data; WAN
optimization
; API integration; custom translation; and information encryption, protection,
synchronization and deduplication.

Read some-more about cloud storage

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for disaster recovery
?

Know how good you’re covered
in an outage

The inclusion of cloud gateways in cloud storage solutions is “absolutely crucial,” Gartner’s
Ruth said. No IT emporium wants to buy a solution, afterwards have to figure out what happens next; they want
a warden solution.

This valid to be a box during Merced College. Using an on-site fasten backup resolution for 65
virtual servers, 30 earthy servers and 24 terabytes of storage-area-network
storage
was unwieldy to maintain, Peterson said, and it didn’t have a ability to offer an
adequate backup history. A one-month-old file, for example, expected wouldn’t be accessible if a user
wanted it; and it could take days to find a record if a tapes were stored off-site.

It only seems to me [that cloud storage] is safer; we wouldn’t have pronounced that before, though now I
can contend that.

Don Peterson, executive of IT, Merced College

With a gateway cloud storage solution, information retrieval now takes seconds instead of
days, Brotner said. “There’s a singular representative that loads on to whatever PC or server we wish to back
up information from. All we need is a good Internet connection,” he said. Once a representative is commissioned on
the server locally, all restorations, setups, backups and so on are managed from a singular Web page.
“We didn’t have adequate ability to be means to cycle by and save a month’s value of data,” he
added. “Now we’re means to keep fundamentally as most information we want. It’s as elementary as flipping the
switch on a Web page.”

Storage stalwarts like IBM, EMC Corp., Hitachi Data Systems Corp., NetApp Inc. and Dell Inc.
offer small in a approach of gateways. To offer them, these incomparable vendors initial will have to find a
new approach to beget income when they stop offered storage hardware and start offered services.
Most expected this will occur by merger of rising vendors. But as it stands, those
emerging vendors — like StorSimple Inc., Panzura Inc. and Zetta — browbeat a cloud gateway
domain. In general, Ruth said, vast IT shops are heedful of startups, though forward-thinking companies
realize it could be value weighing a risks and holding a possibility on innovation.

“The impulse someone like NetApp puts gateway capabilities inside their existent storage arrays
– that’s going to be game on. That will lend a credit that’s required for vast IT
shops to unequivocally start regulating open cloud storage, since afterwards it only becomes another provisioning
point,” Ruth said.

Bottom line? “There is still trepidation,” Ruth said,” though cloud storage is developing
credibility day by day.”

Let us know what we consider about a story; email Karen Goulart, Features Writer.




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