DATA PROTECTION
High Performance
Storage in the Cloud
By ERIC THACKER
Volumes have been written about the significant short- comings of tape as a medium for data backup and archiving.
Until recently, the only alternative has
been to buy a bank of disks and use those
as your storage target. Unfortunately, even
with deduplication, this can be an expensive proposition, both from a purchasing
standpoint (with capital expenditures budgets squeezed) and operationally (
extensive infrastructure management including
power, cooling, and space consumption).
An alternative for backup and archiving,
as well as for the hosting of applications
that has gained considerable traction with
IT management, is leveraging the public
cloud. While the market for cloud storage
is still maturing, it’s rapidly getting to the
point where many IT managers may routinely consider it an option for any new or
retooled application or data protection.
How could they not, considering the
economic advantages? Vendors typically
charge on the order of 15 cents per giga-
byte per month, where the comparable
cost for owning and operating your own
storage networks can be anywhere from $1
to $25 per month. Internet services enjoy
huge economies of scale from their buying
power and the operational processes and
redundancies they have developed around
managing data reliably on commodity
hardware.
