Company provides transparent access to cloud providers and business applications for enterprise IT
Adoption of cloud storage services is increasingly desirable for organizations of all sizes. A pay-as-you-go model makes sense rather than heavy capital expenditures on storage systems that won’t fill up immediately or which reach capacity too fast: storage systems that can scale up and down according to business needs rather than a pool of underutilized storage resources draining a company of data center floor-space, power and cooling.
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Let’s face it, storage systems are costly to acquire, maintain and expand. In the previous few years, company IT infrastructures have been constrained at best, having flat to modest IT budgets. Today, we are seeing companies face expensive technology refreshes in a still uncertain economy. In a world where storage requirements continue to double every year or two, many organizations are now looking for alternative solutions and the cloud is becoming more appealing. With the introduction of cloud storage enablement solutions for accessing the storage cloud’s affordable and dynamic resource – and its ability to seamlessly integrate with many front-line business applications, deployment of cloud storage now becomes possible.
Secondary data, associated with applications such as data protection, archiving, disaster recovery and daily data management operations become an ideal match with the storage cloud. Midsize organizations, many cash-strapped and with minimum IT staffs, would like to adopt a cloud strategy but run into implementation roadblocks.
TwinStrata, a start-up in Natick, Mass., this week is introducing to market software that makes cloud storage transparent to the customer’s applications, hardware and systems.
There are several issues that hamper cloud storage adoption. They start with data availability. IT organizations are leery of losing control of access to vital operational data. Security of data beyond the walls of an organization’s own data centers is another big worry. Can anyone trust a third-party organization to maintain regulatory compliance? What about loss of performance and latency when companies need to access data in the cloud? Will bandwidth costs rapidly offset any capital expenditure gains? Is cloud storage just a way to cut telcos into the storage pie? All these issues abound. But probably most concerning is the end-to-end performance, security and availability requirement for accessing each cloud storage provider.
This raises major concerns about data access times especially in a disaster-recovery event, preventing unwanted access to private data and will the data be available when we need it. Another concern is being held hostage by getting locked into an unresponsive service provider. Yet another hindrance to adoption entails the prospect of either adopting proprietary cloud storage interfaces or waiting for new standards to emerge and be adopted by both cloud service providers and application providers.
TwinStrata, founded in 2007 by an experienced team of storage industry veterans, is introducing intelligent storage cloud software to help midsized companies protect and manage business application data. The company is introducing what it calls “cloud storage enablement” software that addresses many of the cloud storage adoption concerns outline above. Watch out for when TwinStrata’s cloud enablement software ships sooner-than-later this year.
