iWave CEO: Planning for Successful Private Cloud Storage

The famous New York Times reporter, Thomas Friedman, author of "The world is flat - a brief history of the 21st century," described the world as flat. In a field of fair competition all competitors have equal opportunities for success. In this case, the advantage of competition is whether the company has excellent business knowledge. The enterprise knowledge mainly involves available information and data product information of related businesses.

Now collect data from different sources and different stages of the life cycle of the business, such as business transactions, employee performance, and data that interacts with customers. This is why data has exploded in recent years. All these data must be stored somewhere, so the demand for the storage market is also increasing. The famous market research company Gartner stated that by 2020, the storage market will have 20 times growth.

Combine storage with cloud computing

In the past few years, the computer world is brewing a new revolution - cloud computing technology. Cloud computing refers to a way to provide computing power, whether it is software services or infrastructure services. Cloud storage is one of the services that cloud computing can provide. Compared with traditional storage and independent servers, cloud storage has the following advantages.

Scalability - Cloud storage space allows users to dynamically adjust and use it on demand.

Disaster recovery - Cloud storage has distributed features.

Load balancing - cloud storage and dynamic routing can reduce the load on the link data.

Mobility - Cloud Storage allows any authorized user to access data on a corporate LAN or the Internet.

Cost savings - Cloud storage eliminates the need for professional IT maintenance staff.

Cloud storage can be divided into public cloud storage and private cloud storage. Public cloud storage stores data on third-party servers and is responsible for data security and data maintenance by third parties. Private cloud storage, on the other hand, stores data in the enterprise while private cloud storage has all the advantages of cloud storage.

For SMEs, public cloud storage is a good choice because it does not require any cost overhead. Third parties such as Amazon and Google offer higher data security than SMEs themselves. However, for a company, private clouds may be a better choice.

First, companies can use existing infrastructure such as servers. Secondly, cloud computing is still in its infancy and there is still a lack of corresponding standards. This may bring about dependence on a certain vendor's products. For example, after a company selects a specific supplier, it is impossible to select another vendor (migration data), which will bring huge costs, and it will also pose risks for data security. There have been several recent public cloud service outages and public cloud security vulnerabilities. This also sounded a warning for companies to store confidential data in third parties.

Why choose private cloud storage

Need to overcome the following problems while deploying a private cloud

Automation - Without automation, IT companies are unable to cope with the large amounts of storage in private clouds today and in the future.

Unreliable scripts - IT companies have historically relied on storage administrators to write storage scripts and use them for certain automated administrative tasks, and this move has brought two fatal flaws at the same time:

The writer's variability - the script is tied tightly with the storage administrator who writes the script. And usually there is no complete record, once the author leaves, the script will become unusable.

The script lacks standards - some scripts are often developed for specific environments, which leads to breaking strict property standards.

Automating the provision of private cloud storage addresses these deficiencies

End-user needs - When faced with traditional storage model response and service delivery deficiencies, end-users may bypass the IT department and turn to public cloud service providers. This will not only weaken its importance in the enterprise, but also undermine the security of data. Private cloud storage meets the needs of end users and ensures data security.

IT administrator cost overhead - As the data grows exponentially, administrators responsible for enterprise storage become scarce. From the current situation, the growth in the number of people engaged in this industry is minimal. In this case, the employees who can do their job become very valuable. Private cloud storage will reduce the number of full-time staff required for maintenance, and at the same time reduce the cost of training for new employees.

Compliance - With the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, companies have stepped up efforts to monitor data. Private cloud storage ensures that every step of the operation follows the rules while reviewing and recording operations.

It needs to be compatible with other cloud products - the development of cloud computing technology and the new Japanese drama, while the private cloud products are compatible with IaaS, PaaS, VDI, etc. while they are flexible.

Private Cloud Storage Mandatory Attributes

The best way to implement a private cloud storage solution is to hire a solution provider that specializes in this area. So ideally private cloud storage solutions should have the following attributes

Self-service portal - should provide storage consumers (such as DBA, application developers) automatic storage services and more advanced storage services (such as replication, migration) entry, and tracking requests. At the same time, the entrance should also be provided with proper authentication.

Storage Service Directory - A fully automated storage service directory should be provided and access should be granted according to defined roles.

Fully automated - services should be fully automated without the need for storage administrators to intervene manually.

Storage classification—The ability to store administrators' classification storage and storage services should be provided to classify services differently.

Universal Compatibility - Compatible with Multiple Vendor Hardware Devices

Interoperability with other clouds - Should have interoperability with other public and private clouds, which requires the support of standard APIs.

Policy-driven services—Allow storage administrators to define policies that use storage services, such as the level of automation that administrators can use to set up different certifications for different services.

Comprehensive audit services - Private cloud storage security audit log records should be provided and all operations tracked.

Private cloud storage offers many advantages. In the future, private clouds should be the focus of business planning.