Useful Cloud Advice, Part One. Storage

There’s a whole lot of talk about cloud revolutionizing IT, and a whole lot of argument about public versus private cloud, even a considerable amount of talk about what belongs in the cloud. But not much talk about helping you determine what applications and storage are a good candidate to move there – considering all of the angles that matter to IT. This blog will focus on storage, the next one on applications, because I don’t want to bury you in a blog as long as a feature length article.

It amazes me when I see comments like “no one needs a datacenter” while the definition of what, exactly, cloud is still carries the weight of debate. For the purposes of this blog, we will limit the definition of cloud to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – VM containers and the things to support them, or Storage containers and the things to support them. My reasoning is simple, in that the only other big category of “cloud” at the moment is SaaS, and since SaaS has been around for about a decade, you should already have a decision making process for outsourcing a given application to such a service. Salesforce.com and Google Docs are examples of what is filtered out by saying “SaaS is a different beast”. Hosting services and CDNs are a chunk of the market, but increasingly they are starting to look like IaaS, as they add functionality to meet the demands of their IT customers. So we’ll focus on the “new and shiny” aspects of cloud that have picked up a level of mainstream support.