ParaScale Session at Cloud Expo

In 2009 users were presented with a lot of choice, especially with cloud computing and cloud storage. Two primary trends were evident including the arrival of private cloud storage options with increasing choices for businesses looking to deploy their own storage clouds inside the firewall; and a rapid proliferation of public cloud storage service options with many service providers coming to market with varied offerings.

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2010 promises to bring with it even more excitement and advances in cloud computing and storage. Sajai Krishnan, CEO of ParaScale, predicts that in 2010:

Cloud becomes an action verb – We’ve already seen “Cloud” taken to new heights as an overused adjective and noun. In 2010, marketers will out-do themselves by clouding the landscape with more product names and descriptions. Admittedly, this prediction is tongue-in-cheek, but unfortunately fairly close to the mark. So remember that you heard it here when someone tells you “we are going to cloud it.”

Virtualization will drive private cloud storage adoption in enterprises. Virtualization has driven huge efficiencies in organizations. The weak link today is the storage infrastructure behind virtualized servers. The need to eliminate the SAN bottleneck and automate provisioning, configuration, management and recovery across the compute and storage tier will drive enterprises to begin to adopt private cloud storage.

Commodity hardware displaces proprietary storage. In 2010, the theme of “intelligence migrating into software” continues with more hardware commoditization. Just as Linux displaced expensive server gear with its attractive commodity footprint, Linux-based cloud storage will displace legacy expensive storage for the same reason: it gives the user choice and it’s inexpensive, highly scalable and easy to manage.

The middle tier emerges - The strategic importance of a low-cost, self-managing petabyte scale tier that provides a platform for analysis and integrated applications emerges in organizations with large stores of file data. This middle tier will be the “data net” a “catch-all” persistent repository that can hold multiple kinds of data; optimize for performance and cost; support large scale data-in-place analysis, while eliminating unnecessary data migration and administrative tasks; and enable “cloud bursting,” the seamless ability for service providers to offer spillover capacity and compute to enterprises.

“To pick a metaphor, the public cloud is akin to renting a car,” said Krishnan. “IT admins are going to learn that the same car can be driven home, parked in your garage and used more conveniently. In other words, in 2010 enterprises are going to enjoy the benefits of the same public cloud architectures like Amazon and Google but with the performance and security within one’s own datacenter.”