Kathy Gibson reports from the Huawei Cloud Congress in Shanghai – Organisations are looking to the cloud to meet their future data centre needs – but they could run into problems if they store their enterprise data in today’s public cloud.
Noam Shendar, vice-president: business development at Zadara Storage, points out that public cloud storage may appear to be an ideal solution, but much of what’s available fails to meet enterprise storage needs.
Shendar explains that there are three major categories of storage:
* Object – the most common type in the cloud. It’s very simple to use, using http protocol, doing just two things: uploading and downloading files. It does this very well, very easily and users can grow it very large. Amazon has more than 2-trillion objects stored. The limitation is that you can’t change the files, and it doesn’t support existing storage protocols. In terms of changing, you have to upload the entire file again if you make any changes. So it’s good for static files – not so good for files that have to change. Which means it’s not good for most enterprise workloads.
* File – or NAS, is the most common enterprise file type. It’s about 80% of all the capacity inside companies. It’s simple, but also reasonably functional – you can make changes, edit a file, keep old versions and more. As a result its very popular – but not available in most clouds.
* Block (SAN) storage – good for database files, used where performance is important, especially transactions. It is also missing from most clouds, and those that offer it tend to have problems.
“So file and block storage are what enterprises need,” he says. “But they also need more. File and block are languages, but there are also features that are needed, like creating large volumes, high IOPS, SSDs for performance critical tiering; data protection and encryption, clustering/sharing, instant snapshots; and remote replication.
“These are all 100% standard on-premise – but in the cloud they are missing. And this is a problem because enterprises require these features and without them cannot run at all, or run poorly.”
This means enterprises run into the problem that their requirements that are not met in the cloud. In fact, the two leading cloud storage providers provide very few of these features, Shendar says.
“Customers want enterprise storage capabilities as well as the benefits that cloud offers – economics, flexibility, focus and self-service.”
Added to this, enterprise customers don’t want multiple solutions running in different places. “If they can they will have the same type of storage, managed the same way on-premise and in the cloud,” says Shendar. “They want storage that works the way they are familiar with, but is available on-demand.”
He concludes that most cloud storage solutions are not ready to meet enterprise needs, which means that the majority of organisations will opt to keep their data on-premise.
“There is an opportunity here,” Shendar says. “A Zadara VPSA (virtual private storage array) meets customers’ needs and allows them to store their data in the public cloud.
“Customers like the cloud because it’s easy and flexible, both in terms of use, costs and planning. They want to take advantage of the cloud. But their key applications require enterprise storage. They can’t rewrite their applications specifically for the cloud environment,” he says.
“However, if they are offered enterprise storage as a service, then there is no risk and no additional time involved.”
In 2013, there was one company that stood out in terms of cloud storage – Amazon Web Services – and it was far and away ahead of its competitors, according to Gartner.
In 2014, Amazon Web Services is still dominant, but Microsoft Azure has leapt into the Magic Quadrant. Everyone else has moved further behind those two leaders. So it’s really becoming a two-company race.
Amazon’s revenue is in the billions of dollars – doubling each year – and larger than the next 14 IaaS cloud providers combined. Revenue will continue to grow, but not at double rates.
So why is Microsoft catching up, how are they becoming bigger and being able to take market share away from Amazon? The reason is simplicity and ease of use. Microsoft has spent a lot of time making it easier to use its service, which is the main reason it is taking share away. The other reason is that Microsoft is able to sell to its existing user base.
Of course, both of these companies also have very good compute services.
But storage is where things get interesting.