Hybrid Cloud Storage / Cloud-Integrated Storage Technologies

As data growth continues to accelerate, IT administrators are facing increasing pressure to improve the utilization of storage assets. The amount of data accumulated by corporations and organizations is increasing exponentially with approximately 80% of all data being static or inactive. The costs associated with storing this infrequently accessed data are at the forefront of IT administrator’s budget plans creating a need for efficient and cost effective data archiving solutions.

With the introduction of Cloud platforms, many new approaches are available that enable IT organizations to reduce cost. As organizations transform to utilize cloud-based platforms, some may move to SaaS (Software as a Service) platforms, where entire applications are hosted and run in cloud datacenters with all storage managed within that cloud datacenter. However, most organization’s deployments will involve utilizing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) deployments, where the cloud is an augmentation of their on-premises operations.

IaaS deployments are used to extend the traditional available resources of the datacenter by using elastic resources within the cloud environment, such as storage. Typically, this is the easiest resource to take advantage of as it does not require transformation of applications, but rather integration of cloud storage via either software or hardware based appliances.

The following illustration depicts storage approaches for storage servers including traditional on-premises storage (server with RAID array), Cloud Gateway storage server (server accessing cloud storage), and Cloud-Integrated Storage (on-premises server and storage with integration to cloud storage as well). Cloud-Integrated Storage is also often referred to as hybrid storage.