Check out Paul Carpenter’s recent blog post about the rapidly evolving storage world. He talks at length about the coming end of file systems and the advent of the scalable object cloud.
“Many evolutionary processes start with pain. So does this one - real PAIN. Stands for Proprietary, Aging, Isolated, Non-standard. Pretty much describes the archiving infrastructure in many organizations. See the picture below.
“As usual, history explains a lot. The many IT applications in any given enterprise aren't typically born in the same era - they were built using the UI paradigm du jour, using the storage technology in vogue at the time, with backup and especially archiving often added as an afterthought on very ad-hoc machinery. Hence the PAIN.
“Enter the crisis. No more business as usual. Like all of IT, storage budgets are severely hit. All of the sudden, ordering the new model in the catalog to replace the existing stuff is out of the question. But when the going gets tough, the creative get going. Some of them were wondering whether object storage technology had sufficiently evolved to have a single private cloud service take on the role of the many disparate backup and archiving boxes hooked up to storage devices across the enterprise.
“For quite a few, the answer turned out to be positive: deploying a unified approach, they started to redirect the archiving data flows from the legacy apps to a centralized cloud storage repository. Next, given the exquisitely open, standards-based object infrastructure, they started to wonder whether this nice, uniform, centralized resource couldn't be subverted to feed new application functionality that seemed way out of reach in the PAIN era.”
To read more, check out the PCSquared blog.
