Before making use of storage in the cloud, there are a few things businesses should know.

This is according to , storage sales specialist at HP. He believes there are three main factors that organisations need to keep in mind before moving to a cloud utility model, whether considering an  internal or outsourced framework.

EFFICIENCY IS KEY

“In order for storage in the cloud model to work, operational costs need to be reduced by a minimum of  30 to 50%,” says Day. To increase effi ciency, he believes that companies also need to be using half as  much power and half as much physical space as currently. “This will not only aid in making a storage  environment run more efficiently, but is what is required to make green computing a reality,” he says.

One of the most effective ways of achieving data centre optimisation is through deploying an automated solution. “Through autonomic tiering, an organisation is able to lower costs, increase agility and  minimise risk for cloud data centres and the enterprise,” he says.

KEEPING IT SIMPLE THROUGH AUTOMATION

Through autonomic quality of service, says Day, business will have the ability to quickly adapt to change,  thereby increasing their competitiveness. “The storage solution used needs to be intelligent enough to recognise data needs and respond to them automatically,” he says.

Using a fine-grained, automated approach to service-level optimisation such as offered by a 3PAR  solution, an automated tiering system creates a LUN on several tiers of storage, ensuring that the right quality of service is delivered to the right data at the right time.

“Storage needs to be constantly rebalanced to ensure maximum optimisation is reached. Data will  automatically move to the tier where it is best suited,” Day explains. Gaining optimisation through automation also needs to remain simple. “The less time spent on ensuring optimisation occurs, the  more time a company has for driving innovation and increasing competitiveness,” says Day.

CATERING FOR MULTI-TENY

Furthermore, says Day, organisations have to move away from deploying storage for siloed  environments. “Data centres should be shared across the company infrastructure,” he says. With this, he  believes thin-provisioning is the key as it allows the organisation to redeploy resources as required. 
“This keeps data sharing and corporate storage agile and increases effi ciency,” says Day.

An  organisation must build pools of storage assets that can be allocated or flexed to support the application services required by the business. “This helps improve resource utilisation and allows  applications to be provisioned more rapidly than traditional approaches,” he says.

This needs to be done while ensuring high-performance and resiliency. However, warns Day, it needs to  be achieved without compromising the high level of service to users. Security, in this case, remains an  issue. “Companies must be able to segregate its different operational functions in a shared- environment,” he says.” And HP’s 3PAR storage offering can achieve all of these objectives”