Impact of the Cloud on Enterprise Storage

Storage providers were all about cloud last year as they saw an opportunity in the public, private, federated as well hybrid versions of cloud. Cloud could be scaled infinitely so there was no concept called as a large or small cloud. Any number of yotta bytes could be sold on any cloud.

Storage users and administrators of data centers were the ones who were very happy with the emerging cloud computing market.  But now, cloud computing has started to show signs of weakness and is giving up in some spaces. Cloud storage software were not able to do well in the past few months. Parascale and Maxiscale, both are struggling to sustain themselves in the cloud. Same is the case with Atmos Online launched by EMC. On one hand, Cleversafe is experiencing growth because of the fact that it always laid an emphasis on data security in cloud from the very beginning and it also has good connections to the open source community.

Enterprise data is now moving from private data centers which are managed by internal IT managers to other data centers which are either managed or owned by different service providers. These services that the vendors provide are also provided in cloud-as-a-service or storage-as-a-a-service models. Value added services like logical partitioning of data, thin provisioning, data snapshotting etc. provided by storage vendors attracted corporate customers and also justifies the high price of selling storage space along with the maintenance of profit margins. The storage services providers are also adopting the same strategy these days and it is proving to be successful. When the data is moving from an on-site data center to arrays that are operated by service providers, the better deals are given by the service providers.

Storage service providers are getting the better out of the same products that are marketed by storage vendors to enterprises. But then, on the enterprise data center front, the opportunities are slightly better with the storage vendors.