Cloud Storage as a Service

“Cloud Musings” Named A “Top 50 Blog”

By G C Network | August 27, 2010

My appreciation and thanks goes out to Jeremy Geelan for including “Cloud Musings” on his list of the Top 50 Cloud Computing Blogs. Thanks is also in order for “HighTechDad”…

Will Oracle Buy Informatica?

By G C Network | August 25, 2010

According to 1,250 ERP Software Advice readers that will be Oracle’s next acquisition. Terradata came in a close second in this race, suggesting that Oracle will “…play it safe next time…

What’s Next For Oracle?

By G C Network | August 14, 2010

Watching Larry Ellison and Oracle over the years as it has morphed itself is a real study in market dynamics.  It’s transformation from database company through middleware provider to now…

Enterprise Architecture Enables Innovation: Melvin Greer, Lockheed Martin

By G C Network | August 11, 2010

Earlier this week, my good fried and NCOIC colleage, Melvin Greer was interviewed by Rutrell Yasin of Government Computer News. In the interview, Mel focused on the importantance of entrprise…

Are You A Cloud Architect? NJVC Needs YOU!!

By G C Network | July 31, 2010

If you are a cloud computing architect, have I got news for you!  NJVC, one of the largest IT solutions providers supporting the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), is building…

“Army Private Cloud” RFP Released

By G C Network | July 28, 2010

Last week the US Army released  a procurement solicitation for the Army Private Cloud.  This $249M solicitation calls for a 1-year base period with four, 1-year options. Department of the…

Cloud Musings Direct Launches

By G C Network | July 15, 2010

In response to request, the inaugural “Cloud Musings Direct” newsletter was launched this week.  This bi-weekly electronic newsletter will highlight important government cloud computing industry trends and events.  If you…

CloudExpo Europe 2010: Not Your Father’s Prague

By G C Network | June 30, 2010

When my good friend Jeremy Geelan invited me to speak at CloudExpo Europe in Prague, Czech Republic my imagination went into overdrive.  Being a child of the 60’s and a…

NCOIC Plenary Highlights Collaboration and Interoperability

By G C Network | June 29, 2010

Last week in Brussels, Belgium, the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium highlighted it’s support of collaboration and interoperability through an information exchange session with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and…

GovLoop “Member of the Week”

By G C Network | June 22, 2010

Thank you to Radiah Givens-Nunez and GovLoop for the honor of being their Member of the Week for June 21-25, 2010. Created in 2008, GovLoop is an online social network…

In SAN vs cloud storage – a gray or silver lining? , Joseph Hunkins review last December’s observations of cloud storage by Chris Mellor of Techworld:

“Google does not use a storage area network (SAN). It has no world-wide network-attached storage (NAS) infrastructure. Instead it uses thousands of Linux servers with cheap disks – direct-attached storage (DAS) – and organises their contents inside its own Google File System (GFS).Cloud computing storage is the antithesis of traditional SAN and NAS storage. The good news is that relatively few organisations will have the size needed to build out cloud computing infrastructures. The bad news for SAN and NAS storage vendors is that they could be so incredibly massive as to trigger a significant migration of their customers to using storage-as-a-service on the massive clouds provided by Google, Amazon and others.”

Of particular interest to me were his quotes on storage cost.

“Where SAN costs will run in the neighborhood of $20 per gigabyte, the (internal) cost of cloud storage by Google is reported to be about $1 per Gig. At Amazon E3 the cost is about $1.80 per year per Gigabyte of storage.”

Meanwhile Symantec acquires Swapdrive announces it’s new offering for cloud storage providers.

“We’re going to leverage our file system know-how to deliver next generation object storage for cloud computing,” said Rob Soderbery, senior vice president of the storage and availability management group. The system will mostly be used as the back end for Symantec Protection Network SaaS offerings, but will also be available to service-provider customers, according to Soderbery. Currently called Symantec Secure Scalable Storage (S4), the new system is slated for an alpha later this year, beta early next year and live availability for SaaS in mid-2009.

Bottom line is that cloud storage as a service is significantly cheaper than “build-your-own” SAN storage

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G C Network