Scality's Brad King delivers an afternoon session on Thursday
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The final session I attended at this year’s WorldHostingDays was delivered by Brad King, of Scalty, and entitled, “Cloud Storage: Threat or Opportunity?” a look at a more specific sub-set of the ubiquitous cloud discussions taking place around the show.
He began with a discussion of a few of the key charateristics of cloud storage, saying it’s like a bank, in some ways (keep this safe for me, and then give it back), and it’s like a brain (remember this, and recall this).
One of the interesting things about cloud storage is that it’s a variation on storage, as opposed to an entirely new way of doing things. That is, it’s not difficult for anybody (say, a prospective customer) to understand. The only challenge would be helping them to understand the value.
The advantages of cloud storage, he says, include reducing cost and increasing the availability of data, even when systems fail.
A couple of fundamental issues about the storage world are that the volume of things being stored is growing, that that volume of stored objects will continue to grow forever. And that some of the traditional storage hardware and storage techniques have some physical limitations that, big picture, make it impossible for them to keep up.
There’s a lot of reason, says King, for a new storage paradigm to succeed (he’s talking about object-based cloud storage here).
The threat in that, is if the cloud storage model does succeed, then those providers who stick entirely with traditional storage models are left behind.
But there are already examples of cloud storage tools that have seen success. Obviously, Amazon’s S3 is one. DropBox is a probably more specific, small-scale one.
King says that if you are selling storage, there is an opportunity in selling cloud storage. All hosting providers need to provide storage, he says, and cloud enables providers to contain their costs. There is lots of good technology out there, including some from Scality, and also importantly, there are some true standards emerging.
Scality’s cloud storage system is called RING, and it’s a distributed storage architecture based on commodity hardware, rather than just a REST API in front of a SAN or NAS.
In discussing another of the selling points of cloud storage, he mentions specifically that the model is pretty perfect for a lot of applications, in that it enables the builders and operators of those applications to forget about volume management for stored objects.
So far, the company has some big customers, including a very large Belgian mail system, as well as some hosting providers such as Host Europe and Intergenia.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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