FINAL WORD
centres aspire to be cloud-like – to
meld together commodity hardware
with software and automation
that delivers agility, elasticity,
resiliency, security and most of all,
simplicity (by shedding decades of
accumulated complexity in storage
and networking).
Generally, the term public cloud
is used to refer to Infrastructure/
Platform as a Service (IaaS/PaaS)
offerings like AWS, Microsoft Azure
and Google Compute Engine.
However, like most, we also include
multi-tenant Software as a Service
(SaaS) providers like Salesforce and
Netsuite, as well as consumer internet
giants like Apple and Facebook (B2C
SaaS). Keep in mind that the success
of public cloud does not mean the
world is moving to a handful of data
centres.
Rather we see public cloud customers
investing aggressively in their own
cloud infrastructures as a core
competency, convinced that they
are not only saving money at the
scale at which they operate, but also
differentiating their products relative
to the competition.
That being said, despite the growth
of public cloud, private clouds will
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USER RIGHTS CONTROL
GLOBAL ACCESS
OVER DIFFERENT
ASPECTS OF A DOMAIN
CONTROLLER, SERVER,
OR WORKSTATION.
USER RIGHTS ARE
CONFIGURED USING
GROUP POLICY, GIVING
GRANULAR CONTROL
OF EACH COMPUTER
INDIVIDUALLY
continue to thrive for a few key
reasons:
• Manufacturers need storage close
to the equipment they control;
• High frequency trading must be
executed close to exchanges;
• Virtual desktop infrastructures
(VDI) and other IO-intensive
applications need to be close to the
users they serve (thereby delivering
a user experience that’s better than
a laptop with a local SSD);
• Healthcare providers, financial
institutions and federal agencies
have additional security constraints
that necessitate keeping data in
data centres they control;
• Current application designs may
not afford easy migration to the
cloud; and so on
So rather than move core workloads
to a public cloud, many of these
large end users are building their
own clouds for the same reasons
that SaaS and consumer tech
players are.
So what will the storage industry
look like in the next few years?
Expect even more major shifts in
the storage industry going forward.
It is high time, for at least the
performance storage market, to join
servers and networks on a Moore’s
Law curve. At the same time,
storage must shed the complexity,
consulting overhead and unfriendly
business practices that have helped
make AWS so appealing. Alone,
either the transition to flash or
the cloud would be profoundly
disruptive. Taken together, none of
the storage solutions designed for
mechanical disk and the traditional
data centre will make the leap
to the solid-state cloud. Now the
competition is on to see which
storage solutions will deliver the
most compelling business value in
all-flash.
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