Cloud storage is nothing new, but we’re now starting to see real integration between on-premises enterprise arrays and as-a-service cloud storage solutions. I’ve recently written two pieces on this subject for Gestalt IT and thought I would direct you, my beloved readers, over there to have a look!
Storage in the Cloud
First up is NetApp Heads Into Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, wherein I discuss my impressions of an overlooked announcement at the recent NetApp Analysts Day in Boulder, CO. In short, NetApp is putting their enterprise storage expertise behind a new NFS storage offering inside Microsoft Azure.
This is major news since it extends NetApp’s Data Fabric into the cloud for real, completely integrated with Azure. It’s a great fit with Microsoft’s world of enterprise cloud solutions and could really help pull old NetApp out of the datacenter.
Next, I posited that 2017 is shaping up as The Year of Cloud Extension, as more and more storage systems truly connect to the cloud. See a trend here? It’s not just a gateway to the cloud, it’s real integration from datacenter to cloud.
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Stephen’s Stance
The Big Story here isn’t that some storage is connected to the cloud. It’s that we’re fundamentally changing how we look at storage locality. We’ve always thought of storage as being “here”, whether it’s in the datacenter or on our own devices. But we’re starting to see storage as being fundamentally “there”, in the cloud, with a local representation wherever it’s needed.
From iCloud Photos to Google Drive to NetApp and Primary Data, we’re putting storage wherever it needs to be. And this is a major shift for computing, from the iPhone to the datacenter. Watch this space! And read about it on Gestalt IT.