In 2011, cloud storage was one of the few technologies that could attribute its success to the lagging economy.  “Cloud storage systems and services helped users deal with the uncertain economics of 2011 by letting them fund that growth using operational expenditure funding, rather than having to make capital expenditures in the hardware, software and people required to run one’s own data center,” says Sharon Fisher in her Network Computing article.

The growth in demand for storage has been huge.  According to Aberdeen Group, 15% of companies in a June study reported their data growing between 80% and 100% annually.  And it’s not just organizations that need cloud storage.  With digital media files so large in size, consumers are also looking for an online repository for their personal media.  This year we’ve seen a variety of cloud service offerings emerge targeting anywhere from the consumer to the large organization.

From a business standpoint, organizations are seeing benefit from cloud storage in a number of ways – to relieve the pressure of escalating IT infrastructure costs and as an effective alternative for disaster recovery.

According to Techaisle, an SMB-focused research firm, “SMBs globally spent $11 billion on cloud computing in 2011.”  This is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12% until 2015.

In his article “Tape Makes a Comeback in the Era of Big Data” on IT Business Edge, Arthur Cole says tape is still a viable storage option.

The need for bulk data storage at a relatively low cost has led many companies to take another look at tape, even though experts have predicted its demise for nearly a decade. Tape’s biggest drawback is the perception that it represents old technology, so how could a professional data operation rely on anything as antiquated as tape?

Well, initial deployment costs are 75 percent lower than disk, and operational costs have dropped seven-fold over the past five years. And since data is saved across all manner of virtual and cloud infrastructure these days, the type of underlying hardware has become largely irrelevant. Tape’s speed and storage space is impressive too. The latest Linear Open Tape (LTO)-5 format boasts 1.5 TB of capacity with transfer speeds now exceeding 100 MBps, more than twice that of SATA RAID-5 and RAID-6.

Since tape will only probably be just one part of the storage environment for most companies, it’s important that they choose a storage solution that can navigate across tape, disk and cloud tiers. This will help maximize cost efficiencies and keep tape alive for another decade.

Welcome to “Cloudy Wednesday”. Each Wednesday, Evolving Solutions will focus on the latest news and information on cloud computing.

With many customers fully virtualized, it’s time to take them the rest of the way toward a true cloud solution, said Carl Eschenbach, at the Global Technology Distribution Council Summit in Newport Beach.

In the article “VMware’s Eschenbach: Six Ways To Drive Transformation Into Cloud” on CRN, Scott Campbell shares Eschenbach’s strategies on how the IT channel can take advantage of clouds.

Here are the strategies Eschenbach suggests:
1. Deploy Private Clouds
This still represents the largest opportunity, says Eschenbach.
2. Deploy/Manage Public Clouds
“We can help build public cloud and do that by leveraging the services that our partners have,” Eschenbach said.
3. Partner with Service Providers to Resell Cloud Services
VMware, and distributors can “bridge the gap” between public service providers and the VARs to sell public services back into the private cloud.
4. Assist Hybrid Cloud Migration
There is an opportunity to take applications that exist in data centers today and helping them move to public cloud, whether it’s software as a service or just a public cloud provider.
5. Buy and Resell Private Clouds
Building private clouds themselves or going to a service provider who has already built one and buying a rack.
6. Migrate/Transform/Build Applications on Top of the Cloud
“Companies have to think about selling software as a service and how to do that without disrupting the massive revenue streams they have today,” he said.

The final result will be significant adoption of cloud in the market by customers, Eschenbach said.

Jon Brodkin’s recent article on CIO discusses new research from Duke University and Microsoft tackling the increased powering complications from data center virtualization.

A virtualized power shifting (VPS) system budgets power with an application-aware power distribution in mind. VPS dynamically shifts power among various components to efficiently utilize the total available power budget, as workloads and power availability vary. Power is distributed among application components in the correct proportions to achieve the best performance.

Research shows, in contrast to existing powering techniques that use only one power control knob, VPS uses multiple power control knobs and selects the optimal combinations of power settings to optimize performance within the available power budget. Although VPS is still a work in progress, it still seems likely the capability could be integrated into future power management systems.

Data center and IT Management is quickly changing. A recent report from the Lippis group speaks to three strong trends that are taking shape and will create a ‘perfect storm’ for the data center networking industry.

• The first storm is represented by merchant silicon 10 and 40 GbE chips which lower the barrier of entry in the Ethernet switch market.
• The second storm is caused by the creation of a software ecosystem in the networking industry.
• The third storm is the paradigm shift in enterprise IT spending thanks to mobile and cloud computing.

It is important to have a knowledgeable, experienced partner to help you navigate these changes in data center network management. Evolving Solutions is a leader in data center network technology and our talented, innovated team will be able to provide the expertise needed to develop successful IT solutions for each client.

One Wednesday June 8th we’ll discuss data center hardware and cloud computing.

The move to data center virtualization and cloud computing is placing new demands on the system network fabric. This new network traffic is increasingly east-west to enable machine-to-machine communications versus the traditional north-south network traffic.

To deliver the most efficient flows for east-west network traffic large, flat networks are now required. Blade Network Technologies in their article “System Networking for Today’s “East-West” Traffic Flows” introduces us to TRILL or TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links.

TRILL implements routing at layer 2, uses every link in the data center, harnesses the network’s maximum capacity and eliminates the congestion and under-utilization problems associated with the traditional Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). TRILL also provides a more efficient means of implementing loss-less networks for converged data and storage networks using Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI and NAS.

TRILL is emerging as the standards-based approach to implementing the large, flat Layer 2 networks required to meet the demands of data center virtualization and cloud computing. IETF is currently working to approve the TRILL standard in 2011.

Force10 Networks recently unveiled data center core and top-of-rack switches that mark the first offering of high-density 40/100G Ethernet taking data center network solutions into the zettabyte era according to Network World.

Exactly how big is a zettabyte? Most major switch vendors offer exabyte-scale data center networks. An exabyte is equal to 1 million terabytes or 1 billion gigabytes. The zettabyte is equal to 1,000 exabytes taking data center networks to new heights.

Check out Monday, May 31st for a discussion of the changes within Local Area Network Solutions (LAN).

Many organizations are still gaining an understanding of cloud computing especially in the current market as cloud computing has experienced a huge investment growth. A recent article on CIO Insight by Mal Postings title “ABCs of Cloud Computing” helps breakdown the decision points for cloud computing.

The first evaluation point for cloud computing is architecture. There are two main considerations:

• IT functions need to move away from a business process engineering view which is based on the principle that assumes processes are all largely performed within an organizations’s boundary. Instead, a new three-tier model will emerge: Software as a Service (SaaS), Industry as a Service and Enterprise Services. Each of these tiers are supported by Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• The following new technical considerations will rise in importance: connections to third-party service providers, new approaches to identity and access management and encryption security.

Check back Monday, May 23th for a discussion on the “B” in “ABCs of Cloud Computing” – business benefits.

As cloud computing continues to grow and becomes a real sourcing option for more and more organizations, Evolving Solutions wants to guide clients through the process of determining the right cloud computing service for their organizations.

Below are some top trends in cloud computing from a recent eWeek article titled “10 Cloud Computing Trends That Are Rapidly Catching On.”

• Continued use of the public-private hybrid
• Cloud computing deployments will be fast and furious – companies want the multitenancy and elasticity benefits.
• Integration for cloud computing and SAAS applications will no longer exist for end users

On Friday, May 20th we’ll start a discussion on the ABCs of Cloud Computing.

The huge investment growth in cloud computing technology has created a new sourcing option for organizations to consider. As an early leader in the move to data center virtualization, Evolving Solutions continues to demonstrate forward-thinking by, now, helping clients to evaluate their cloud computing needs.

Research by Gartner points out the importance to IT service organizations to be mindful and resist ignoring the cloud computing sourcing option to prevent service clients from reaching out to other firms directly and to take advantage of possible lower cost structures that cloud computing can provide.

When looking to source cloud computing Gartner in its article “Four Risky Issues When Outsourcing for Cloud Services” advises that clients look to a firm that can address and answer authentication requirements, provide clarity around all cloud computing options, assist with a thorough business case analysis and provide risk analysis of cloud computing technology and services.

Check back Wednesday, May 18th for information on how cloud computing trends.