CW+ Premium Content/IT in Europe

The year has been a very cloudy one. And that is not a comment on the UK’s record wet weather in 2012, but about cloud computing, cloud data storage and its near ubiquity in IT marketing. But now the hype is beginning to clear, we can assess the readiness of cloud data storage in its various guises and its limitations. So, let’s look at the various types of data – primary, nearline, backup and archive – and assess the ability of cloud data storage services to handle them. Primary cloud storage This is still cloud data storage’s weakest area, but that is not to say the cloud cannot handle primary data at all; it just has its limits. Cloud’s key technical constraints are latency and bandwidth, as a result of the fact that data is held remotely. Vendors have addressed this by devising hybrid cloud products that store hot data on local drives and this could include flash storage for fast response times. iSCSI block access is available on some hybrid cloud products so it is possible in theory to use cloud data storage for ...