Why Corporate Cloud Storage Doesn't Add Up 141
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia sees few business IT situations that could make good use of full cloud storage services, outside of startups. 'As IT continues in a zigzag path of figuring out what to do with this "cloud" stuff, it seems that some companies are getting ahead of themselves. In particular, the concept of outsourcing storage to a cloud provider puzzles me. I can see some benefits in other cloud services (though I still find the trust aspect difficult to reconcile), but full-on cloud storage offerings don't make sense outside of some rare circumstances.'"
Private cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
They will literaly save hundreds of millions in hardware and power bills, as they can consolidate tons of servers together. The reason? Most boxes that they current have, utilize 1% of network traffic, less than 1% of CPU, and about 10% of hard disk space. Why? Because every project has their own boxes for political reasons, for redundancy, and most importantly, so that when they saved $10,000/year on hardware, they didn't lose $1,000,000 because the service was unavailable for half a day.
Because private cloud means that you have an instant sandbox for your apps, over a number of servers that the app can freely be moved to, this is the driver behind adoption of the model.
Public cloud is laughable to them, as the public cloud providers can pry their data from the company's cold dead hands.
Not to mention the wonderful PR side effect of the company being "green".
Uh, what? (Score:3, Insightful)
To the best of my knowledge, nobody pitches this 'cloud storage' stuff as a replacement for local storage, unless they are also selling some hosted software-as-a-vendor-lock-in 'solution'. It's a sufficiently overwhelmingly bad idea that nobody even tries. So, what exactly is he wasting an article on?
Yup, SATA drives are cheap and reasonably zippy. Y'know what's less cheap, more complex, and not as zippy? Good Backups, including offsite. And that, (along with the web hosting and CDN focused stuff) is what the 'cloud' people are selling. No shit delivering files over the internet with a 200ms round-trip and a teeny pipe isn't going to replace the local storage or a network share a couple of GigE hops away. Replace that balky tape library the next time it conks out, though? Not certain; but much more conceivable...
Re:Duh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Private cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is you're talking about virtualization, not cloud. Cloud is a real thing that not many people actually do. It's also a nonsense buzzword sprinkled like MSG across the menu of everything IT does. Excuse the pun, but virtually none of what is called cloud deserves the name.
The cloud has always existed for Corp IT (Score:5, Insightful)
Why don't people look in the history books of computing. If they did they would see that in the before the 80's everything was in "the cloud", except back then they called it servers. They rented these servers and the storage space from IBM, Digital, HP and a few other server providers. The personal computer came a long and data started shifting on to local hard drives and WIntel or Novell LAN servers.
Now they have the problem of trying to maintain every spreadsheet and Access DB sitting on a managers laptop. To solve this they are going back to the future and storing stuff back on servers sold to us by young people who never knew what DASD is. Controls and audits will demand restricted access and rules be put in the cloud for protection just like before. After about 10 years we will all be bitching and complaining about the cloud and praising local storage for it's ease of access and not having our data held hostage by providers. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There is nothing new under the sun people, just move along.
Re:Private cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
I just came from a very large banking organization, and their business case for cloud is to set up a series of private cloud servers. It's not about putting everything on Amazon etc, but rather about putting the services into their own datacentres.
I'm not sure why you got an "insightful" rating for your comment. While what you said is true, a corporate private cloud is not the public cloud the submitted article is talking about.
Private cloud storage has always been around, but it used to be called a "fileserver", or maybe a "SAN", so just because they are calling storage consolidation a "private cloud" doesn't mean it's something new.
Re:The bottom line is we don't need IT department (Score:5, Insightful)
Right - and when you can integrate your SAP Cloud ERP system, your SalesForce.com CRM system, your Workday HRIS, *and* the data from your 500 retail locations that you poll daily, all within your Netezza AppNexus data warehouse to generate dashboards using your MicroStrategy MCDWS BI system, without your IT department, you let us know...
Storage is pathetic (Score:5, Insightful)
I have the same issue. I work for a small suburban newspaper, and even our hot data set is over 1TB, plus append-only archival data of more than 4TB.
When I tell these "cloud backup" providers this they do a double-take and then start talking laughably high prices or they just back off and say they can't really handle our archival data set. It's quite pathetic when my 10TB backup storage server in a fire-resistant, water-resistant enclosure in the shed cost under $5k when built - and that was when 10x1TB disks was a lot so the disks cost over $2500 by themselves.
Because I'm in Australia I also have the issue of bandwidth. I'd need a backup provider to peer with my ISP via a local peering point that offers unmetered traffic; with 100GB/month limits considered very big here I couldn't possibly back up over a metered link. Even then, my redundant two ADSL2+ links achive about 6Mbit/750kbit and 4Mbit/500kbit per second each, so I'd probably need to pay to run fibre from the nearest line along the train line (est $50,000) and pay over $1000/month for a fibre service just to talk to the backup storage host.
I'm negotiating to move our backup server to a business down the street and run an 802.11n point-to-point directional link between us instead. We each get to fail over to each others' Internet services if necessary, we exchange backup storage, and neither of us gets to pay through the nose for it. It's not as good as a fast link to a DC somewhere, but it's a hell of a lot more practical.
The other issue with cloud backups arises when you need that 5TB (mine) or 38TB (yours) in a hurry, for disaster recovery. You can't exactly run down the street and grab the server with its disk array then restore over 1Gbit ethernet or direct to locally attached SAS/eSATA/whatever. Nope, you have to download all that data over whatever Internet link you have access to. If that's not the dedicated fast link your premises has (say, if they've burned down) then you are screwed.
I'll keep my primary backups within driving distance, thanks.
Re:Private cloud (Score:5, Insightful)
Undoubtedly so. In fact I can't imagine for a second that Amazon and the like aren't running on VMs. But you're exactly right. Virtualization by itself is not cloud any more than an engine is a car. There, you knew there was a car analogy in there somewhere, didn't you? ;-)
It's not a mistake, though, it's marketechture. Virtualization is old hat. You can't get people to shell out the big bucks for that, but if you rebrand it "cloud" (ooooh!) you can get people to pay more.
Re:The cloud has always existed for Corp IT (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who forget history are doomed to pay overpriced consultants to reinvent it for them.
Re:Private cloud (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Private cloud (Score:4, Insightful)