Cloud storage

Our society has entered a new economy in which networks are taking the place of markets, and access to services is replacing ownership.

It's worth remembering that, over the years, market suppliers have come up with solutions that represent major advances in storage systems. But these increasingly advanced and sophisticated systems have one major drawback for businesses. Although the price of storage disks is falling sharply every year, the influx of new features leaves the cost of purchasing and operating these storage systems too high. This is particularly true for unstructured, fixed data, which is becoming ever more voluminous.

New approaches are tackling this situation: how can exponentially growing volumes of unstructured, fixed data be stored at lower cost? And how to do so with features that meet these requirements.

The Internet revolution has made it possible to develop solutions to the various problems faced by data centers. Under the pressure of a few forerunners (salesforce.com, Amazon, etc.), soon joined by all the major suppliers (Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, IBM, etc.), Cloud Computing became a new Eldorado. This movement is gaining momentum and expanding across all IT disciplines, particularly in storage. This is Cloud Storage.

As with Cloud Computing, many startups are the real initiators and continue to drive this new market. But all the major players in the storage sector, as well as French startups, have also recently entered the Cloud Storage arena. As for service providers, they are making the necessary developments to convert their current offerings into Cloud Storage services.

Stronger constraints – exponential growth in data volumes, IT budgets under pressure from the economic crisis – are forcing CIOs to reconsider where and how to make new storage investments.

The stage is set for the adoption of innovations such as those provided by Cloud Storage startups and service providers. New, less expensive storage solutions, better suited to unstructured and fixed data (e-mail, scientific and technical data, multimedia files, archives, etc.) and non-critical data, are now on the market. This is an opportunity to be used selectively and progressively.

In this document, we wish to :

• introduce the different dimensions of Cloud Storage ;

• present its main architectural and technical features;

• a practical approach to its use;

• define its main markets ;

• look to the future.