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Storage: Private Storage Clouds

By Dick Weisinger

Amazon S3 and other public storage offerings have popularized the public storage cloud.  But companies are investigating cost savings that can be derived from their own private versions of cloud storage.

Many storage vendors are offering private cloud storage.  The products include IBM’s Business Storage Cloud, EMC’s Atmos, Symantec FileStore, and ParaScale Cloud Storage.

Typically these private storage cloud vendors aggregate many cheap commodity servers, like x86-based ones, with each server loaded with storage devices, usually SATA drives.  The servers are wrapped by software that makes the cluster of servers appear as a single device, and adding new servers is easy to do as additional storage space is needed.  Storage is then exposed to users and applications via CIFS and NFS file protocols, or by using SOAP or REST Web Services. The technology can support scaling the storage capacity from terabytes to petabytes.

The advantages are that cloud storage is easy and inexpensive to maintain and that storage can be more efficently utilized when it is centralized rather than having many isolated servers each with a margin of idle capacity to allow growth. 

Private clouds are especially good at handling unstructured data, like office documents, images and video. 

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