Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Storage: Services in the cloud will meet tomorrow's storage needs

Despite vendor promises, managing storage is getting harder, not easier. Storage vendors boast of smart applications that ease storage management to the point that a caveman could do it. They promise tools that discover neighboring devices and servers without human assistance - and that automatically configure themselves accordingly.

As is often the case with sales pitches, those claims are partly true (or only half lies). Make a small detour from the standard configuration, and the easy setup promised by such tools fails miserably, leaving inexperienced admins to fend for themselves.

Even the much-touted simplicity of iSCSI SANs has failed to materialize. For a novice, the advantage of iSCSI over FC (Fibre Channel) boils down to not having to learn another class of switches and networking gear. But getting iSCSI hosts and target devices to work together requires skills that were never needed to manage a LAN. To add insult to injury, most storage management suites completely ignore iSCSI. And new technologies on the horizon, such as FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), will only add complexity to the administrative puzzle.

How will customers cope with the conflicting needs for increased capacity and cost effectiveness? For many, SAAS (storage as a service) will be the answer: Instead of paying through the nose for storage devices and their maintenance, CIOs will find it more convenient to rent storage space - and divert the money and resources saved to more strategic projects.

Initially, SAAS will be sparked by faster and more affordable bandwidth, along with the surplus capacity of titans Amazon, Google, and the like. Other vendors will follow, creating Internet-based storage services of unprecedented size that will undercut that market domination of such companies as EMC, HP, and IBM.

SAAS will make storage more affordable and granular - you pay for what you use and no more. Best of all, it will empower customers to deploy technologies whose storage costs would have been otherwise prohibitive.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: EMC, Google, Hewlett-Packard, HP, IBM, Promise

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • A Data Protection Taxonomy
    The purpose of any taxonomy is to enable the subject matter to be studied better. This paper presents a data protection taxonomy, that is, a classification of aspects relevant to data protection, that the industry is encouraged to use as a reference when asking and answering questions about data protection. This taxonomy is defined in terms of who, where, what, why, and how. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • Managing Data Storage in the Public Cloud
    With organisations struggling to control costs, they face increasing demands to keep pace with explosive data growth and ever-changing regulations. To address these challenges, storage industry professionals are increasingly turning to cloud computing and cloud storage solutions. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • Introduction to Storage Security
    Many organisations face the challenge of implementing protection and data security measures to meet a wide range of requirements that lie beyond regulatory compliance. This whitepaper highlights the basics of identifying key business drivers for data security, describes threats and attacks, summarizes security concepts and relationships, and then describes what constitutes storage security.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments

HP and IDG news, product videos and resources