hybrid cloud storage

Three Questions To Ask About Hybrid Cloud

Bobby Varghese

Gone are those days, where cloud computing was the future. It’s here and it is changing the way you and thousands of other organizations do business at a great rate.

Migration to a hybrid cloud model is one of the latest trends that stands out. A hybrid cloud model uses multiple clouds for service – private, as a mix of on-premise and data center supported, and public environments, supported by third parties.

According to the TechPro Research, 36% of the companies who responded to their survey were already hybrid cloud users and 32% were considering to migrate. Industry statistics seem to support this trend, too.

Agility and flexibility are the main advantages that hybrid cloud offers. Workload can be managed on an application-by-application basis, this, in turn, enables enterprises to plan for a growing mobile workforce and allot resources to the Internet of Things (IoT) applications and big data analytics.

If your organization is already going hybrid or considering to migrate to hybrid, or if your IT prefers going to the cloud because it is easier than working through legacy IT service delivery systems — then ask yourself (and your broader IT organization) these three questions:

 

1. Do I want to optimize capacity by harnessing the power of automation?

Call it resource optimization on-premises. Call it lowering the monthly cloud bill.

The good news is — there is no issue here. It is all opportunity. You can use automation driving both software-defined data center technology and cloud APIs to be a better steward of your resources and funding.

2. Can I give our mobile workers secure remote access to our corporate cloud?

An access solution that compromises the mobile experience may be as bad as one that undermines security. If your security controls are hard to navigate, people may work around them to save time.

3. What network and data security policies does our cloud providers offer?

Security should be top of mind.

Start with the technology and systems that protect the cloud infrastructure. Then, look at the encryption of data transmissions. See how it defends data in transit.

Sysfore, Microsoft Gold partner, uses leading network, technology, and service expertise to deliver IT infrastructure as a service anytime, virtually anywhere, quickly and efficiently. Contact one of our experts today and we will help you find the perfect solution for your business. Write to us at info@sysfore.com or give us a call at +91 (80) 4110 5555.

Microsoft Azure and StorSimple: A true Hybrid Cloud Storage Offering

Microsoft Azure and StorSimple: A true Hybrid Cloud Storage Offering

Deepika Nagpal

Worldwide data stores are roughly doubling every 2 years. Most of this growth is concentrated in unstructured data. An abundance of applications produce active unstructured files including office document applications, email, content management systems, and PDF document formats; as well as intensive graphics and streaming data from engineering, healthcare and entertainment industries. Base products developed by storage vendors over the years have included NAS and SAN primary storage, backup software, disk or tape backup systems, and dedupe appliances. More recent development has added native dedupe, snapshots and replication to backup solutions, as well as adding the cloud as a backup target. However, in the face of massive data growth, traditional technologies are becoming a drain on the budget, and making the storage infrastructure more complex than it already is.

Storage is the underpinning of the IT infrastructure stack, impacting everything else above it. Strategic leaders, in response to various enterprise-wide surveys have indicated that storage related priorities are top of mind in 2014. These priorities are associated to:

  • Managing data growth and infrastructure sprawl.
  • Managing cost complexities due to ad-hoc storage expansion.
  • Leveraging cloud for efficient DR.

The Hybrid Cloud Context for CIO’s and IT Managers

Considering the necessity of enforcing governance policies for corporate data assets, it is unlikely that completely external, separate cloud solutions will solve storage concerns. Instead, success will likely come from integrating enterprise cloud services with enterprise infrastructure.

It turns out that there is a new kind of storage, cloud–integrated storage, or CiS, that combines on-premises SAN storage with the ability to store, access and manage data in cloud storage services. One of the storage applications for CiS is using cloud storage as a tier to store inactive data, creating a hybrid cloud storage solution.

With CiS, corporate IT policies for data retention and security can be applied to data stored in the cloud. Security concerns are addressed by the CiS system through the use of AES-256 encryption technology.

In this fully integrated architecture, IT retains on-premises storage strengths such as local performance for active data, fast recovery, and strongly encrypted data, coupled with cloud-based storage capacity on-demand. At the same time, the cloud also provides a very secure and efficient storage tier for timely data protection and recovery. The advantages of this highly scalable architecture are particularly strong when managing massive data growth in unstructured data.

The StorSimple Approach

Microsoft Azure StorSimple provide a hybrid cloud storage solution that consolidates the management of primary storage, backup, archival and DR. By eliminating frequent storage upgrades, tapes and traditional DR, Microsoft Azure StorSimple has the potential to save 30%-40% of your current storage TCO.

The heart of hybrid cloud storage is active tiering. StorSimple continuously identifies data set policies and characteristics, and automatically places data sets on one of four storage tiers(including Microsoft Azure). Tier 1 is very active data located in the SSD’s. This data is not deduped or compressed. Tier 2 is frequently accessed data still located in the SSD’s and undergoing primary dedupe. Tier 3 is occasionally accessed data located in the HDD’s, deduped and compressed. Tier 4 stores inactive data in the cloud, where it remains easily recoverable. All tiers are centrally managed. This extremely efficient tiering capability offers greatly reduced TCO.

Storsimple-1

Key Benefits:

  1. Eliminate ad-hoc on-premises storage expansion by leveraging Microsoft Azure cloud storage.
  2. Eliminate the need to ship tape backups to offsite by introducing cloud backup.
  3. Reduce storage TCO by automatically & intelligently archiving older data to cloud. 

    StorSimple-Benefits