Monday, March 3, 2014

March

Two major topics today: Object storage and cloud. And YES, I believe the two are in fact very closely related: Objects (defined as unstructured and permanent, unchanged data) seem to be by far the best fit for data to be stored in the cloud!
To get us started - and if your are like myself still trying to come to grips with the object Hype - here's a great Object Storage 101 for your reference (thanks George Crump!)


And Chris Mellor -over at the Register- points out that object storage is ".. headed towards mainstream status, with ViPR, Black Pearl and EVault leading the way. Others, though, held back. As of the year end, we saw IBM doing nothing much with objects, NetApp apparently standing still with its StorageGRID, and Dell exiting the field." Read the details here!

Now, expanding the focus and looking beyond objects and storage only, using cloud services may not be the nirvana many CxO's are dreaming about: Forbes recently had a great article about this and made the point very well by listing the following checkmark items for cloud management:

This means that at any moment a CIO must be able to answer the following questions:
  1. Are all the applications and services in our control running properly?
  2. Are all the applications and services running in the cloud or as SaaS running properly?
  3. Is there a network problem in the network under our control?
  4. Is there a network problem in the public Internet?
  5. Is there a network problem in the network of the cloud or SaaS provider?
I like numbers 2. and 4.!

Still, cloud becomes more popular and less expensive by the week - as the most recent price war between the cloud "behemoths" Amazon and Microsoft shows: