Hybrid Powered Cloud Storage

In a recent Storage Switzerland webinar, “Building A Hybrid Cloud Storage”, we polled the audience about why they were considering cloud storage. 60% of the respondents selected: “to lower costs”. This is not surprising given the fact that many of the large cloud service providers (CSPs) have long been touting their ability to provide cost-effective storage to the enterprise. What’s one of their secrets? Object Storage technology.

Secure Commodity Cloud Storage

But while many of the webinar attendees were looking for ways to drive down data center costs through the use of cloud storage, one of their key requirements was to do so securely using their existing storage assets. One way to accomplish this goal is through the use of software that has the ability to transform existing storage – whether it be disk drives internal to a server, external JBODs (just a bunch of disk) or spare SAN/NAS storage capacity – into an elastic pool of encrypted object storage capacity.

Unstructured Data Deluge

As Storage Switzerland has covered in a recent article, object storage is ideally suited for managing unstructured data repositories – PDFs, email, user files, rich multimedia, machine sensor data, etc. According to many industry sources, unstructured data growth now accounts for nearly 90% of all data growth in the enterprise. So clearly, this is an opportunity for businesses to offload their primary storage systems, lower costs and perhaps even improve how they feed data analytic systems so that corporate data assets can be effectively monetized.

Object Storage Cloud

But object storage systems should have the ability to seamlessly interconnect with other object stores residing in public cloud infrastructure like Amazon’s, to take advantage of plummeting storage costs and to augment corporate DR and backup capabilities. This is really where IT organizations can drive additional value to the business. For example, by leveraging the ability of object storage software platforms like Cloudian’s, businesses can seamlessly grow their addressable object storage into the cloud on-demand.

To learn more about how you can build a hybrid cloud for your business, please click on the following link for the on-demand version of the Storage Switzerland and Cloudian webinar, “Building A Hybrid Cloud Storage”.

Cloudian is a client of Storage Switzerland

Click Here To Sign Up For Our Newsletter

About Colm Keegan

As a 22 year IT veteran, Colm has worked in a variety of capacities ranging from technical support of critical OLTP environments to consultative sales and marketing for system integrators and manufacturers. His focus in the enterprise storage, backup and disaster recovery solutions space extends from mainframe and distributed computing environments across a wide range of industries.