virtualisation & cloud services
S-EXPRESS
Paul Turner of Cloudian examines the role S3 is playing within public cloud strategies and beyond.
W
ith the explosion
in the creation
and retention
of unstructured
data, public
cloud services have been increasing
in popularity and importance as an
affordable, high performance solution.
Two big stats suggest it’s a
market worth backing - IDG estimates
unstructured data is growing at the
rate of 62 per cent per year, with
93 per cent of all data in the digital
‘universe’ will be unstructured by
2020. According to Gartner, data
volume is set to grow 800 per cent
over the next five years and 80 per
cent of it will reside as unstructured
data, so this is clearly a trend with
incredible momentum.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
has prospered in this market
since it was launched just over 10
years ago and has reached such
a position of influence that it is
shaping the cloud storage market
as a whole, not just public cloud.
At the heart of AWS is the Simple
Storage Service, or S3, which
supports many familiar global online
services, including Spotify, Pinterest
and Netflix. S3’s relevance and
versatility has seen it adopted as a
cloud storage platform by so many
organisations that S3 compatibility
is rapidly becoming a ‘must have’.
In the decade since its launch, S3
has moved from startup service to
de facto cloud storage standard.
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The impact of S3
The rise of S3, which Amazon
describes as ‘cost effective object
storage’, has also helped to drive
the adoption of object storage in
the broader market. It’s deployed by
enterprises for applications that require
massive amounts of unstructured data,
including content media storage, back
up and archiving, data analytics, private
cloud, file distribution and sharing.
The sheer popularity of S3 means it
has the largest number of applications
written to the specification – today,
more than 4,000 ISVs support S3.
Most storage vendors have
already announced that they connect
to S3 or are working to do so.
In addition to Amazon, there are
a number of competing storage
implementations, including Google
Cloud Storage, Openstack Swift,
Rackspace’s Cloud Files and Ceph,
that are S3 compliant. These services
use the standard programming
interface but have different underlying
technologies and architectures.
The link between public and private
storage solutions is also growing as
more businesses opt for a hybrid
approach to their storage needs. The
dominance of S3 in the public cloud
storage space means there are great
advantages to using it for on premise
solutions as well. For any organisation
that uses object storage as part of a
hybrid solution – and there are many
– S3 has quickly become a generally
accepted requirement for delivering
affordable, high performance and
scalable data storage.
But compatibility is key. With
S3 and object storage so heavily
interlinked, there are compelling
reasons why companies seeking to
implement a cloud strategy, whether
public, private or hybrid cloud,
should take a closer look at the S3
compatibility credentials of their
storage supplier. For organisations
considering deploying an open-hybrid
cloud and/or moving data between an
S3 public cloud and the private cloud,
it is of the utmost importance they
understand the true extent to which
a storage platform is compatible with
the S3 standard compared to the
level of compatibility claimed. With S3
quickly becoming the object storage
standard, choosing the right storage
platform for a hybrid or private cloud
can save organisations money and
shave months off the time to deploy.
Enterprises will need to
consider some drastic changes in
storage infrastructure to tame the
data explosion. For those with an
unstructured data challenge, the
development of the object storage
market will be an important part of their
strategy into the future. Given its central
role in the evolution of object storage
and its growing adoption in enterprise
storage strategies, S3 is likely to
become a ‘must have’ as organisations
seek to balance the need to provision
for ever increasing capacity, while
keeping a lid on cost.