Companies that are looking to move their servers into the cloud in 2014, will quickly find that one of the biggest challenges surrounding this issue will be the cost-effective designing of storage infrastructure.
Storage area networks
Traditionally, a storage area network (SAN) is connected in order to provide storage to the virtual servers in the cloud. However, a SAN can create a single point of failure, producing yet another complication for many companies. In order to overcome this issue, an additional SAN is utilised in most cases; this additional unit acts as a fail-safe but has a drawback in that it also substantially increases the cost of the cloud infrastructure.
Maximising cloud performance
Martin Bester, Cloud Integrations Specialist at Oceanhost, says: "These days, innovative software allows companies to use the physical servers in their cloud to create a distributed, high-speed storage network. If set up correctly, this configuration can, in many cases, outperform traditional SANs due to the fact that virtual servers have the ability to write to a local disk, as opposed to a disk on the network."
Bester added: "Integrated storage replicates data across multiple physical servers, usually over a 10GbE network. It works very similarly to a RAID array on a SAN but removes the single point of failure problem that we so often see in the industry. It also considerably reduces the set-up costs."
A highly scalable, integrated storage solution
With integrated storage, companies are able to use commodity hardware like SATA, SAS and SSD disks without having to worry about vendor lock-in. Integrated storage is highly scalable and allows companies to increase their storage capacity, as their cloud grows, by simply adding more disks to their physical servers.
"The benefits of integrated storage are allowing more companies to enter into the private cloud realm and move more of their IT off-site," says Bester.
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