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| Hybrid Cloud Architecture Solutions for Storage |
Introduction
Hybrid cloud storage enables you to deploy cloud architecture
on-premises and extend it flawlessly to public cloud environments. Platforms
that manage and synchronize storage are a crucial element in guaranteeing
successful hybrid cloud deployments. Organizations must anticipate the
on-rushing speed at which data is being generated by the new generation of
cloud-ready enterprise applications. They must consider the security strategy
brought about by using the cloud to advance storage capability and react to the
apexes in storage exigency.
Hybrid Cloud Architecture Solutions for Storage
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Asustor Lockerstor 10 Pro AS7110T 10 Bay NAS - Network Storage Enclosure, Quad Core 3.4GHz CPU |
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Unitek USB 3.0 to IDE and SATA Converter External Hard Drive Adapter Kit |
What is Hybrid Cloud Storage?
A hybrid cloud is the way organizations provide revenue-generating
services to their customers and suppliers. As needed, enterprises must support
an assortment of workloads to influence the flexibility of a hybrid cloud
methodology in ensuring that they have the ability to scale up and down. The
deployment of a hybrid cloud environment gives customers the
flexibility needed to select the best suitable service for specific workloads
based on a critical factors analysis, such as cost, performance, and security.
A hybrid cloud, in easy, simple terms, is a combination of public cloud and on-premises
services envisioned to function in unison to bring value to customers,
employees, suppliers, and partners.
The organization’s requirement for a hybrid cloud environment is to
guarantee that each workload, including applications, compute, and storage, is
effectually arranged so that they behave as if they are acting as a unified
system. Lacking careful planning and coordination of both cloud and on-premises
resources, organizations will not reap the full worth of a hybrid storage
environment.
Understanding Hybrid Cloud Storage and Data Surge
Many organizations saw the emergence of hybrid clouds because, partly,
they were very frustrated at the time-consuming rate of change enabled by
traditional IT organizations. Eventually, by integrating low-cost,
easy-to-implement public cloud services with the existing in-house IT systems
and private clouds, the organization realized that it could react more quickly
to market vicissitudes and customer expectations. Hybrid clouds transform the
way businesses manage the capacity planning process, because they no longer
need to over-provision the enterprise data centers for those peak periods.
Admittedly, successful organizations have to adeptly manage and store an
increasingly burgeoning amount of data. Most successful organizations can bring
the appropriate data into the very hands of the customers and employees alike
promptly.
The hybrid cloud storage methodology offers three key advantages, to wit.
● Allowing organizations to keep on using their existing storage system
while also acquiring cloud resources, on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis.
● Providing a tool to operate a diversity of storage resources in a
unified and cost-effective way.
● Supporting the capability to scale resources up or down, based on
changing storage needs.
However, as much as they looked to achieve more – particularly in the
field of Big Data and analytics, the rapport between the organization and IT is
changing. Business leaders understand that they should recognize, more than
ever, the need to collaborate with IT in order to gain more support, especially
for a new generation of storage capabilities to guarantee scalability,
security, and service levels in a hybrid cloud environment.
It is an undeniable tradition of organizations to purchase more storage
capacity to keep up with demand, a quick and easy solution. But, continually
acquiring additional on-premises storage cannot, in any way, affordably scale
with the speedy growth of storage demand. This is particularly true when trying
to meet the demands of peak processing periods, for example, at the close of a
quarter or for the duration of a holiday season. To deal with these cyclic
changes, organizations have begun adding new storage technologies to supplement
their traditional block-based storage system. These organizations have added
file-based and object-based storage to support new unstructured data
types and the applications that are built on them. Though all of these
technologies have helped, they can be at times incoherent and hard to manage.
As a result, many organizations are rethinking their strategy in storage
environments. They now want to unify all their methodology for storing and
managing data, wherever it is physically stored: on-premises, on a public
cloud, or in a private cloud service. Hence, a hybrid cloud storage policy is
turning out to be a necessity to provide the appropriate level of both
financial and technical flexibility for the organization.
Certain Key Requirements of a Hybrid Storage Solution
Since a hybrid cloud solution often provides an on-site appliance,
organizations with hybrid cloud solutions for storage can manage their
resources both in-house and externally, provide data deduplication, local cache
memory, and the IT shop's data encryption. However, it must meet certain key
requirements to make it work. A hybrid cloud storage must function as a
homogeneous storage, be almost entirely transparent, and have the tools in
place to keep it active and extensively used on-site data, and at the same
time, move all inactive data to the cloud. Correspondingly, these very types of
clouds depend largely on policy engines to determine when specific data gets to
move into or pulled out of the cloud.
1. Understand the usage of public cloud services while keeping the
appropriate level of control and protection of data.
2. Set a strategy for any changes in storage requirements based on where
the data needs to be put because of efficiency, the level of performance, and
security. This strategy must be centered on the service level necessitated by
the organization.
3. A need to have an effective way of managing all of the organization's
storage resources based on a combination of the organization’s and IT
requirements.
4. Provide a strategy directives that mandate which data should be stored
in the cloud and which data should remain on the premises.
By adhering to this policy, organizations will substantially increase
their ability to have a well-executed hybrid storage strategy, such as the
following.
● The skill of leveraging its existing storage investments
● The ability to predict storage usage
● The expertise in preventing business disruption
● The capability of controlling and understanding costs
● The competence of managing hybrid cloud resources as a unified
environment
Significant Benefits of Gaining in Cloud Storage Strategy
There are compelling benefits to gain from using a cloud storage
technology, starting with the lowering of overall storage costs. Since it is a
service-oriented approach, there are no storage appliances to acquire, run, or
maintain, and depending on the service demanded, it can significantly trim down
or, if not eliminate, data centers and storage administration costs. Moreover,
a cloud storage removes costly technology refreshes that generally commence
three to five years after the initial acquisitions, which are indispensably
needed to either get the sought-after state-of-the-art technology or to simply
get around in acquiring pricey support contracts for aging arrays. The cloud
storage solutions technology can also provide nearly 100 percent utilization of
the storage by simply eliminating the huge amounts of unused storage volumes
that were needed with traditional data storage for the expected growth and peak
loads. Other than the savings of the overall costs, cloud storage scalability
and its transparent ability to support base and peak loads are its greatest
alluring qualities.
Conclusion
The software that synchronizes and manages storage solutions forms the
backbone to ensure successful hybrid cloud deployments. While hybrid cloud
storage solution technology substantially expands the organization’s storage
capacity, the organization must also stretch out the approach to data access,
data protection, and data security when implementing a hybrid storage plan.
These are particularly important aspects of business computing that should be
sustained in the cloud storage environment.
Furthermore, adopting a hybrid cloud storage solution is paramount to addressing data upsurge, which might otherwise exceed the capacity of the data center storage resources or drive the costs to unmanageable levels. Looking ahead by planning now, an organization will be able to manage and store more data more effectively, at the same time taking a more comprehensive methodology in the management of hybrid cloud solution resources.
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IBM | The Imperative of Hybrid Cloud Solutions for Storage
Purestorage | Cloud Computing With Peace of Mind
Microsoft Azure | StorSimple: An enterprise hybrid cloud storage solution that lowers costs by up to 60%
Computer Weekly | Hybrid cloud storage: What it is and how to deploy it
TechTarget | Hybrid cloud storage