BOOK NOW

ComputerScope editor Paul Hearns will moderate the meeting. From an independent viewpoint, he will promote debate on the business and technical the issues which inform investment in cloud storage.

Operations director at consultancy firm DNM Technology, Richard Nunan will contribute a strategy overview based on his experience in the financial and pharma sectors.

Mark Shaw, now a Dell professional storage architect, will add his perspective from an earlier career in the public and private sectors as a Dell storage customer.

Can your storage bear the weight
of a cloud?

An open discussion for IT professionals moderated
by ComputerScope editor Paul Hearns

TechCentral.ie: EC cloud data rules ‘may drive away business’. New rules will not deliver proper data protection, says professor

While most organisations are familiar with server virtualisation as a step toward private cloud, any such implementation is only going to be as good as the storage on which it rests. More than ever before, the limitations of traditional enterprise storage strategies could become the limiting factors hemming in your cloud.

There are a number of areas that require consideration when looking at storage that will not only meet current needs but support the future expansion of private cloud infrastructure. Scalability, de-duplication, back-up and recovery, auto-tiering and security and compliance must all be weighed and evaluated for any proposed solution. Racks of spinning platters are not necessarily going to meet the needs of a private cloud infrastructure that needs to scale on-demand.

Open standards versus proprietary solutions will determine a large proportion of what is available for any cloud implementation and is a recurrent question of late, with various commentators advocating one approach while denigrating the other.

Scalability and reliability must be considered, as well as more elastic capacity especially if the services that will be deployed on the platform will be served to the public in anyway, where spikes of demand are envisaged.

The storage protocol is also critical, as it too can determine the subsequent vendors and products available. Fibre Channel is a common protocol, but IP-based protocols are also popular, such iSCSI, NFS and Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

TechCentral.ie: Moving to the cloud means buying into the specific tools of the cloud vendor, says Dell

TechCentral.ie: Microsoft aims Windows 8 storage at enterprise data centres, treating hundreds of disks as a single logical storage reservoir

Management is a key concern, for both automation and orchestration, which takes into account data tiering and back-up and recovery, the latter in particular being less straight than forward in a virtualised or federated storage set-up.

With private cloud computing still a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland, good examples of best practice are still relatively rare, consequently analyst and vendor expertise is still the best source of information to help organisations make the right decisions for their cloud infrastructure.

---