CloudEXPO 2019

Leveragng the Cloud as a Smart Infrastructure

Enterprises worldwide are looking for ways to better leverage the cloud as a smarter infrastructure approach. While most have found success in pushing server-based apps to the, one workload has continually eluded architects around the globe in their attempt to leverage the cloud – unstructured data. It’s been surprisingly challenging to find a way of using the cloud to replace the millions of on-premise file servers that users pound on daily. With the growing footprint of unstructured data and the escalating cost of ownership for on-prem storage infrastructure (backup, availability, capacity, and audit/compliance management) and the associated risk of these platforms (data loss, breach, compliance issues), finding ways to leverage the cloud for this has become a holy grail for infrastructure teams.

A number of technologies have evolved into cloud-friendly formats that can now address this workload, allowing dozens or even hundreds of distributed file servers to be consolidated into a single, cloud-resident footprint. These include the latest in distributed network file systems, storage-optimized network protocols, intelligent caching approaches, and global locking schemes that - when used together - can deliver savings of up to 70% on the storage ownership equation and a far more secure and manageable environment.

The objective of this session is to provide the audience with a fundamental understanding of the technologies involved in a successful cloud storage consolidation project today, the basic implementation steps involved, and an overview of a documented methodology that outlines how to determine the ROI from such a project.