A major part of today’s cloud computing strategy for enterprises centers on storage. The benefits of cloud storage to enterprises are far-reaching: a hybrid solution can simplify the management of primary storage, archival, data protection and disaster recovery. It’s a tall order.

In addition to the layers of storage and complexity, IT managers must juggle ongoing storage management using multiple dashboards, energy costs, data center real estate, information management, upgrades and migrations, according to a recent executive summary by technology analysts Taneja Group.

“Organizations tend to gloss over these true costs by spreading out capital costs, placing energy and space cost in facilities budgets, and not tracking IT staff time for management and upgrades,” the summary points out, noting that such cost factors get progressively worse as the size and complexity of storage grows.

As an example of alleviating these complexities, StorSimple claims to securely and transparently integrate the cloud into on-premises applications and offers a single appliance that delivers high-performance tiered storage, live archiving, cloud-based data protection and disaster recovery, reducing cost by up to 80 percent compared to traditional enterprise storage, according to the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company.

Taneja Group’s Technology Validation service conducted independent testing and corroboration to determine whether a single storage system could really encompass primary storage, disaster recovery, long-term data retention, archiving, secondary sites – and what’s more, to do so cost-effectively. The technology analysts ultimately determined that StorSimple is a cloud storage system built to bridge general purpose storage with the “unlimited scale and versatility of the cloud” that manages any stored data with the right kind of storage services throughout its lifecycle.

In related news, StorSimple recently posted a blog entry on its website addressing the difference between caching and tiering, TMCnet’s David Sims reported. Caching, as the blog explains, is retaining a copy of information in a smaller, faster place. Your processor does it, the controller of your traditional storage system does  it for the Web pages you search. Done correctly it’s a wonderfully efficient tactic. But it’s not always appropriate for cloud storage.

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