Storage area networks, also known as SANs, are rapidly becoming the standard for data storage systems due to reasons including the ability to improve disk utilization, powering efficient disaster recovery, driving availability and significantly reducing the time it takes to back up large amounts of data.

 When businesses implement a traditional SAN, they are forced to overcome multiple obstacles such as only having a few inexpensive servers, needing to replicate data for disaster recovery but not having the resources available to purchase fast WAN connections, an administratively intensive economic model, a large risk to the business overall and not enough flexibility.

In a recent presentation from TwinStrata titled, “Extending SANs to the Cloud: What the Data Storage Vendors Forgot,” which took place on September 26^th, CEO Nicos Vekiarides (News - Alert) revealed that currently SAN disk arrays features benefits including being modular, networked and RAID protected but they could become even better over time. In fact, a majority of the reason many companies are currently adopting the cloud is that when comparing traditional data storage to the cloud you can see advantages including:

• In a traditional data storage model it is extremely capital intensive, yet the cloud-based model is OPEX (News - Alert) only
• There is much less maintenance required in the cloud and there is virtually unlimited capacity
• It is easy to power a disaster recovery solution in the cloud, while in traditional data storage it is much more complex

According to Vekiardides, “The cloud presents a very compelling business model in which firms can run their IT operations more efficiently and in particular we are seeing more and more adoption across many industry verticals, really starting from the backup and archive data storage all the way to primary.”

When participants were asked during the event in a poll if they use cloud storage, the results broke down like this:

• 25 percent said yes they are using cloud storage
• 50 percent said they aren’t using the cloud yet but have plans to
• 16.7 percent said they aren’t using the cloud and have no plans in the future to

In addition, cost is a huge factor driving organizations to the cloud due to the fact that they can begin to utilize a pay-as-you-go model that ramps up efficient utilization and it doesn’t have a life cycle that mandates constant replacements. Maintenance is also important when leveraging the cloud and Vekiardides added, “Maintenance is a huge part of a storage budget for companies that keep large amounts of data.

Back in June at an industry conference, the company asked cloud users to rate the value they see when using cloud storage and scalability proved to be key as companies can easily manage growing storage needs as they change over time.

It looks like any business transitioning to the cloud is pretty happy with the results, why don’t you give it a try?

To listen to the full presentation, click here.