Don’t let the headlines or peer pressure push you. The reality is that even the largest of enterprises are starting to copy smaller companies and individuals and are looking to the cloud for the storage of even the most critical of information. And, as many have pointed out, of the three legs of the inexorable move of virtually “E”verything to the cloud, while attending to the data center and network is obviously critical, storage is just as if not more important. In fact, having the right storage solution that can leverage the cloud is core for moving next generation architecture transformation activities ahead faster, effectively and efficiently. 

Finding the “right” or “best” cloud storage

 In a recent webinar I moderated, Hybrid Cloud Storage: Getting the Best of Two Worlds, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Tom Trainer, of Red Hat (News - Alert) and I discussed the problem and looked at why a hybrid solution is a way many enterprises are choosing to accelerate their move to the cloud. 

Some factoids as to why the cloud is the logical place for storage are in order. As statistics from Gartner, IDC (News - Alert) and 451 Group that were presented in the webinar highlight, the market for cloud-based solution stems in no small measure from the explosion and acceleration of unstructured data:

Scale-out storage shipments will exceed 63,000 PB by 2015 (74 percent CAGR)

• 40 percent of core cloud spend is storage related
• Unstructured data volumes are expected to grow 44X by 2020 
• Scale-out NAS software will grow to $7B by 2015

In short, the tidal wave of data is not prediction, but a reality. Storing structured as well as unscructured date —including securing it, accessing it, using “big data” analytics to obtain actionable insights, etc. — is no longer a wish list item but a necessity. For economic, security and operational efficiency reasons the cloud is where IT is realizing storage should be at. With the trends validating the need to move storage to the cloud, how can the move there be accelerated given that improper or inadequate storage can actually be an obstacle for doing so? This includes the elimination of application rewrites.

Red Hat makes a powerful case that a hybrid storage solution, that properly leverages public and private cloud capabilities, is a proven way to get the access, scale and extensibility enterprises need today to maximize the benefits of the cloud and get them quickly.  

And, while I encourage you to download the complete webinar for a detailed understanding of Red Hat’s Storage 2.0 for Hybrid Cloud solution (as well as their on-premise and public cloud solutions), as an inducement to take a deeper dive, the graphic below is a great high-level view of what their view of an open storage fabric looks like.

Source (News - Alert): Red Hat

It also is useful to look at how this translates into the foundation for a hybrid solution at a high level.

Source: Red Hat

As Red Hat pointed out, such a hybrid solution enables two critical things for large enterprises:

1. It ensures global data accessibility by providing data locality and promotes data to the most frequently accessed locations for access and processing.
2. It enables IT professionals to protect data and assure availability at scale.

At the end of the day in a world where many enterprises are now or soon will be dealing with petabyte scale data, the cloud (particularly a hybrid solution) lets IT plan for failures while maintaining data integrity across data center and cloud resources. Peace of mind, along with substantial operational efficiencies and a smoother glide path to the future making storage and accelerate rather than an obstacle of leveraging all of the benefits of the cloud.   Not a bad value proposition.