Cloud Storage Channel Feature
StorSimple Dissects Five Common Cloud Storage Questions
StorSimple, a leader in Enterprise Cloud Storage for Windows and VMware infrastructures, has been helping bring the benefits of the cloud to on-premises applications for years without forcing the migration of applications into the cloud.
Currently, companies such as Microsoft (News 
- Alert) are investing billions of dollars building massive cloud datacenters. StorSimple is seen as a leader in the hybrid cloud storage linking on-premises applications to the cloud storage in these datacenters.
Recently, Dr. Ian Howells, chief marketing officer of StorSimple, sat down with TMCnet to discuss the cloud and cloud storage – two of the most talked about topics today.
TMCnet: Please tell me who you see as the early adopters of cloud storage.
Howells: That’s an interesting question that has become much clearer over the last year. We have seen a major need in the Global 5000 with regional offices and also equivalent midsized companies. Enterprises are faced with the challenge of managing potentially hundreds of regional offices. Regional content and data is not a second-class citizen. Therefore their choice has historically been to either recreate a mini-datacenter in each office for storage, data protection, disaster recovery and archiving (often for Sarbanes Oxley compliance) or have a massive “pipe” to each office and manage everything remotely using expensive storage at corporate.
TMCnet: Another common question surrounding cloud storage is: what kind of applications and content are they managing?
Howells: What we have seen is it is typical to have a common set of virtual machines and a common set of Microsoft applications and infrastructure being used in each office. Therefore being certified by both VMware and Microsoft becomes critical.
TMCnet: What is the problem these customers are facing and what benefits do they see from using cloud storage?
Howells: The following phrase characterizes what people are facing:
“The only thing predictable about storage requirements is that they will be unpredictable and much bigger than you could possibly imagine.” To manage this growth, the focus must shift to managing “Big Content.”
Organizations can roll out a common set of virtual machines and applications and then have a single integrated hybrid cloud storage appliance for primary storage, compliant active archives, offsite cloud data protection and cloud disaster recovery. The appliance offers a “lights-out,” automatic solution for each office. In the case of a failure remote management and recovery can take place.
This approach dramatically simplifies the management of each office and the cost of storage. In the case of mergers and acquisitions it makes it much quicker to integrate acquired companies into the corporate infrastructure and frees up central administration time.
TMCnet: A question on everyone’s mind is what does cloud storage offer?
Howells: The cloud has some inherent advantages when it comes to storage. You get instant thin provisioning; unlimited elastic expansion; built-in high-availability; availability from anywhere in the world; no hardware maintenance; and utility billing for storage.
When you blend this into a hybrid cloud storage strategy it has a major impact on the agility of an organization and lowers the cost structure driving the budget to OpEx as opposed CapEx.
TMCnet: How does one reap these benefits without migrating applications to the cloud?
Howells: One of the myths about cloud storage is you will have to rewrite your user and backup applications because cloud storage uses a HTTP/REST API. The approach we took was to create an appliance that takes less than ten minutes to install in the datacentre and presents itself as a block level iSCSI drive. Applications work out of the box by using this drive that has volumes spanning Solid State Disk (SSD), Serial Attached Scsi (SAS (News - Alert)) and cloud storage.
No changes, at all, are needed with for example VMware, Shared Filed Drives, Virtual desktops, SharePoint and Exchange.
Carrie Schmelkin is a Web Editor for TMCnet. Previously, she worked as Assistant Editor at the New Canaan Advertiser, a 102-year-old weekly newspaper, covering news and enhancing the publication's social media initiatives. Carrie holds a bachelor's degree in journalism and a bachelor's degree in English from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Rich Steeves
