Ongoing vulnerabilities and downtime liabilities in public cloud platforms have driven enterprises to adopt private cloud storage arrangements, creating new solutions that are disrupting the traditional NAS appliance market. Cloud-based block storage has not yet matured to the point that it can handle some critical workloads, but companies are stepping to the plate with highly customized in-house storage architectures that address this need.
In an article for TechTarget, Alex Barrett chronicled the particular issues that sometimes cause issues for Amazon Web Services users. More specifically, industry professionals have recognized Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage service as a weakness in AWS due to its storage constraints and shared nature. EBS volumes may not exceed 1 TB, and the lack of dedicated resources has motivated some enterprises to explore more flexible and reliable alternatives.
Organizations have sought solutions that support elastic clouds and easy scalability. The answer may be storage setups that utilize private cloud infrastructure.
“The object storage area is gaining traction as an alternative to NAS because of its really low price point,” stated Forrester Research senior analyst Henry Baltazar, according to TechTarget. “There’s a major potential for cost savings.”
Vendors such as Swiftstack, a Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance partner, have developed management tools that enable enterprises to build high-performing storage arrangements using commodity hardware. The evolution of OpenStack has also opened many options for creating custom private clouds tailored to specific security and business requirements.
Writing for Virtualization Review, Jeffrey Schwartz examined how Swiftstack’s recent contributions to OpenStack’s global cluster capabilities benefited businesses. Expense reporting software company Concur utilized this new feature to better handle uploaded receipts. Customers’ files are sent to the nearest data center in order to provide a superior experience, and Concur can easily reroute traffic to other locations in the event of a failure.
