I read an interesting article recently in IT Business Edge that confirmed what I’ve been hearing from our customers - data in the enterprise will grow 20% or more annually. This growth will stretch an IT organizations ability to build out storage impacting IT’s ability to meet internal SLA’s for RTO’s and RPO’s. This will ultimately affect business continuance and disaster recovery, and regulatory compliance. And since IT budgets will remain relatively flat, they need to seek alternative options for storage.
One Use Case for Cloud Storage comes to mind immediately when I read this article – Archiving Stale Data to Cloud Storage using NaviSite’s, cloud storage solution, NaviCloud Intelligent Storage (NCIS) Share. With NCIS: Share, we’re offering a cloud storage target for a policy-based, archive-to-cloud use case where the NCIS: Share platform is a secure target for archiving data to the cloud.
To enable policy-based cloud tiering, companies like EMC (Cloud Tiering Appliance) and F5 (ARX Cloud Extender) have introduced an appliance-based approach that sits on the customer premise and, by policy, migrates stale/archive data to the cloud to take advantage of less expensive, scalable, cloud storage by seamlessly presenting a “Cloud Tier” of storage into the existing environment for archive data. The policy-based storage tiering capabilities of these appliances enable an IT organization to extend the storage infrastructure from the data center to the Cloud.
An immediate benefit to the IT organization is that as stale data is archived, IT can reclaim costly primary storage to use for Tier 1 or Tier 2 data storage for new projects or, at a minimum, push out the decision to buy more disk. All-in-all, a solid use case for Cloud Storage.
