Cloud Storage in 2009
Hu Yoshida, the CTO at Hitachi Data Systems, has a blog post up outlining his IT predictions for 2009. Some of them are fairly uncontroversial (midrange storage will continue to get more high-end features, people will spend less money buying new storage, more money on managing it more efficiently, etc.), but there’s one I find interesting:
“The hype around cloud storage will diminish. Attention will shift to practical solutions available through SaaS. While some vendors will continue to take advantage of cloud storage buzz, the industry will come to the realization that cloud is really about the network and not storage. The requirements for storage continue to be scalability, multitenancy, and security whether in the cloud or in the data center. Cloud or SaaS providers like SalesForce.com will offload some of the workload from the data center but the majority of the data will be stored and managed in the data center through 2009.”
On the one hand, it’s not particularly surprising that a pure-play storage vendor that derives its revenue primarily from the sale of shelves of spinning metal thinks that cloud storage platforms won’t take off. More interesting, though, is Yoshida’s contention that the focus will move from “Cloud” to “Saas”.
I think this could be interpreted a couple of different ways, but let’s run with the idea that Yoshida is saying that plain ol’ fashioned Cloud storage, a la Amazon’s S3, just isn’t as interesting as applications built for the enterprise and sold as a service.
The distinction is a fine one – the difference between running GMail for all of my corporate emails (SaaS) and using a plugin for Microsoft Exchange that archives my emails to S3 (Cloud Storage) is one of implementation. To continue with Yoshida’s example – running Salesforce.com for my CRM instead of hosting it locally with backups being stored on Nirvanix….again, just a strategy decision.
Either way, I can’t possibly see a way that people won’t be interested in moving storage out of their facilities. If they turn to SaaS, they’ll move servers AND storage, if cloud storage, just storage (either way, bad news for pure-play storage vendors). I do think that mainline storage is too performance-sensitive, and often cost-effective, to be migrated out of the facility just yet (not to mention the bandwidth requirements). But backups, archiving, file servers – there’s a whole pile of applications where offsite storage can be perfect. Perhaps the hype will diminish, but the investment in cloud storage will only increase.
