Improving Cloud Storage Performance

Many organisations are considering moving their storage facilities to the Cloud to take advantage of the enhanced scalability opportunities.  However, the problem is that the connectivity available to most companies is inadequate for this to be a usable alternative when compared with the performance of local storage that users are already accustomed to.

George Crump of Swiss Storage has written an article for InformationWeek on improving performance when using the Cloud for storage.  He outlines a cache based approach and describes how to balance  performance and availability factors in a way that is optimal for most use cases:

“In almost all use cases, but especially cloud storage as part of a primary storage solution, it is going to require some sort of local presence to cache the active data sets. This local presence can come in the form of a stand alone appliance, a virtual appliance or can be integrated into the storage system itself. The goal of the local presence is to store the active data subset on local high speed storage and then as the data ages push it out to the cloud storage service but do so transparently.  This hybrid type of deployment does mean that the data set does have to be something that can be segregated by access dates. It also means that the ideal data set is one where it has a short create and edit cycle, then is rarely accessed in the future. A file server is an obvious example but messaging and group collaboration tools are as well.” [Read More]

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