Marc Farley - Rethinking Enterprise Storage: A Hybrid Cloud Model

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When I started my career in IT, storage was incredibly boring and something that most people tried to avoid. Enterprise data storage was the domain of strange people interested in tracks, cylinders, and data placements; they did not write codethey were the forgotten people.

Twenty-five years or so later, storage is neither boring nor straightforward. Data growth flows at exponential rates; structured data has been joined by unstructured data, the Facebook generation creates extensive social content in unprecedented quantities, and the enterprise is looking not only at how they store but also how they derive value from this content in the form of Big Data analytics. And somewhere along the line, I became a storage persona StorageBod if you will.

We are at the centre of the storm brought on by cloud computing, and the promise of infinite scale and elasticity are changing the questions asked of enterprise storage. The certainty of managing data storage with enterprise arrays from the big five storage vendors is gone. There are now many possible answers to a problem that has moved away from simply being a case of how much capacity we require to store our applications data. Instead, we are thinking about how to balance user and business requirements in the context of flat-lining IT budgets. Should all our data be stored off-premises in the cloud or should we look at everything being stored in-house? Should all our data be stored in an object store? If so, whose?

This ambiguity brings increasing levels of complexity to the storage world. Data will live in many places on many different platforms and how we manage it, access it, and secure it for the enterprise is the next big question to be answered in storage.

Martin Glassborow

Blogger, Storagebod.com

June 2013

Just as the Internet has fundamentally changed many industries, cloud computing is fundamentally changing the information technology industry, including infrastructures such as enterprise data storage. This book is about one of the new infrastructure game changersa storage architecture called hybrid cloud storage that was developed by a company called StorSimple, now a part of Microsoft, as a way to integrate cloud storage services with traditional enterprise storage. Hybrid cloud storage is a completely different approach to storing data with a single comprehensive management system covering data through its entire life cycle, including active and inactive states as well as backup and archive versions. IT teams with cloud-integrated storage arrays running in their data centers use cloud storage as a data management tool and not simply as additional storage capacity that needs to be managed. That concept takes a little time to fully understand and its why this book was written.

The audience for this book includes all levels of IT professionals, from executives responsible for determining IT strategies to systems administrators who manage systems and storage. The book explains how hybrid cloud storage changes the ways data protection is accomplished without tape backup systems; how disaster recovery works with data that is stored in the cloud; how cloud services are used to facilitate capacity management; and how the performance of data stored in the cloud is managed. Several applications for hybrid cloud storage are discussed to help IT professionals determine how they can use the Microsoft hybrid cloud storage (HCS) solution to solve their own storage problems. The last chapter is a hypothetical look into the future that speculates how this technology might evolve.