I was at the Cloud Computing track of SNIA winter symposium this week, and got a good pulse of the industry happenings. The cloud enablers are gaining momentum, and are geared towards driving the adoption. Similar to what we saw with the adoption of low-cost SATA drives during the 2001 downturn, this year is likely to see a greater adoption of cloud computing to save on capital expenditure. All that – assuming the focus is on QoS!
‘Cloud storage’ data is mostly (~96%) is either the backup/archive or files and only the rest (4%) is of transactional data. The minority transactional data (coming from live applications) is because of the current barriers in ‘cloudifying’ applications as well as cloud storage. Talking purely about cloud storage, the entry barriers are more of the security, SLA compliance, vertical industry needs & transfer times in/out of the cloud.
There is also an unpleasant reality that the ‘unstructured’ data is growing @10% YOY and unless there is a strong audit-ability and quotas on the cloud – your monthly cloud invoices are only going to go up!
