Storage Clouds

Service Providers have realized that Cloud Computing is a significant opportunity to bring more value to customers and their own businesses.
Today, There are many choices of Cloud Computing platforms on the market, with advanced features such as high-performance, security, metering modules and built-in billing engines.

There are, however, very few solutions available to build scale-out, always-online Storage Clouds.

Cloud storage services face monumental challenges in storing an oncoming avalanche of data. Analysts predict online data to grow to 35,000,000 petabytes by 2020. The main challenges therefore become:
* Scalability. Storage clouds will be required to uniformly scale to 100's of petabytes and beyond.
* Availability. Cloud services require the highest levels of availability and reliability to address the SLA's of a wide range of applications.
* Cost-efficiency. Cloud Services are very low-margin, which requires very low TCO. Installing 15 petabytes at once to support future growth is not the best choice.

Current Storage Cloud infrastructures do not meet those requirements. A typical homegrown Storage Cloud architecture consists of banks of commodity servers, each with its own storage, linked together with a software management layer. Most cloud storage solutions have turned to storing multiple file copies in the cloud for reliability. Scaling these systems into petabytes results in very inefficient, expensive and difficult to manage storage infrastructures.

From a cost and efficiency point of view, These cloud storage infrastructures quickly become intractable. Storing 3 copies of each file requires that 100 PB of usable storage becomes 300 PB -- an unwieldy, expensive and unmanageable approach.

Cloud storage providers have realized that increasing disk capacities have a big impact on the reliability of RAID-based storage systems. Rebuilds of a failed 2TB disk drive can take up to a week, during which time the system is less protected and under more stress. Hence the need for multiple file copies.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Storage Clouds
• Cloud Computing
• Object Storage
• Amplidata
• SAAS
• IAAS

[freaklego102]

nice

mathis