Open storage creates an opening in the clouds says Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta Systems The clouds continue to gather around the storage world. IDC predicts that cloud storage and virtualisation will lead to a 10.3% increase in revenue for the storage industry, landing storage at the $12.7 billion revenue mark by early 2012.
Cloud storage is becoming a must-have, and every week, larger and larger public clouds are announced. Apple is the latest vendor to make its cloud service plans known, rivaling existing providers like Google and Amazon. But despite all the noise, data centre managers will be looking to team up with only the most cost-efficient providers. When it comes to storing data in the cloud, which offerings are just jumping on the bandwagon, and which actually can offer enterprise storage whilst still making a saving?

If the ultimate aim is to keep storage costs low, which is the case for nearly all enterprises, then the most compelling opportunity surely lies in open storage. With a unique offering that has been built to serve the needs of the growing virtualisation market, open storage is poised to garner some serious business during the storage shakedown in the coming years.

With open storage, users experience all the benefits of enterprise storage: high performance, faultless data integrity, multiple replication methods, and in-line data deduplication without relying on the vendor lock-in and outdated technologies of legacy storage vendors. Users also benefit from superior storage functionality, tight integration across virtualisation products, and faster development cycles versus proprietary storage products. But crucially, a move to open storage allows the user to save up to 80 percent on storage costs.

There are many companies looking to dislodge the grip on the cloud market held by Amazon and Google, but with open storage, the pricing is competitive enough to make this a reality. The key differentiator is that open storage can run on basic server systems from any industry standard hardware vendor. This makes it a competitor to both proprietary storage providers, selling hardware-software systems, and providers of on-demand computing services, such as Amazon, which use storage software built in-house to maximise the capacity of its equipment.

One organisation that is seeing the big benefits of the open storage is South Korean telecom giant Korea Telecom (KT). With its own utility computing services powered by Nexenta software, KT is able to remain competitive with Amazon’s pricing. Given that the telecom industry is suffering due to decreased traditional services and has been looking to generate cloud-computing providers, adopting a low-cost, open storage strategy is incredibly timely for organisations of KT’s stature.

Using open storage software, KT’s customers can expect to undercut traditional price models significantly. For example, a customer can rent one basic virtual server from KT for around $38.50 per month. According to Amazon’s website, its basic virtual server costs $0.095 to $0.10 per hour for Asia-Pacific customers, representing about $68.40 to $72.00 for 30 continuous days of usage.

With data growth rates exploding the world over, open storage technologies offer a secret ingredient to rolling out public cloud services. For companies with huge scale that do not want to undertake the risk of writing their own storage solution, open storage can finally make the public cloud appear financially viable. This means that for enterprises and data centres, there now is a real alternative to ‘business as usual’ in storage.