up jobs overnight or in some other window
of opportunity. But you might prefer to be
doing continuous replication of data, so
you always have a complete copy of all
important records off-site. And if you ever
need to run an emergency restore of your
data from that off-site archive back to your
datacenter or to a DR site, you will want to
be able to do it as quickly as possible.
To gain the benefits of cloud storage for
more active data processing applications,
you may want to move both the processing
and the data to the cloud. In other words,
instead of retrieving all the information
needed to perform a data analysis, you
may be better off running the analysis on
the cloud service and just retrieving the
data. Of course, even there, you will want
the download of the resulting report to
complete as quickly as possible.
In an Enterprise Strategy Group
technology brief (“Accelerating Cloud
Performance with WAN Optimization,”
August 2010), principal analyst Jon Oltsik
concludes that high performance will be
a key success factor for cloud storage.
“Private or public cloud ROI won’t matter
if users experience reduced productivity due to unacceptable response time to
access files, applications, or their virtual
desktops,” writes Oltsik.
WAN (wide area network) optimization
solutions have been perfected to speed
transmission between geographically dis-
persed corporate locations over private
network, Internet, or satellite links. They
work by deduplicating and compressing
data, optimizing network protocols, and
compensating for latency (delays intro-
duced by network transmission). Usually,
this involves placing a network appliance
that delivers these services at either end
of the connection. Replication and remote
file access protocols often have some of
the greatest potential for optimization,
meaning that bandwidth utilization can be
improved by as much as 95 percent.
