The Cloud Engulfs Storage
Seagate - The Year in Storage
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For consumers, the idea of cloud storage tends to hover at the fringe of everyday awareness. Gmail might offer 7 GB of storage, Dropbox another 2 GB for free, and MozyHome offers 50 GB of system backup for $5.99 per month. It’s easy to forget that such things are public cloud storage services because such labels are rarely used.
Enterprises aren’t as daunted by nomenclature. For businesses, cloud-based storage is no longer a question; it’s practically a necessity. Enterprises are more worried about how to implement cloud storage. Should they utilize a public cloud, a private one, or some hybrid mixture of the two? Increasingly, the answer seems to be swaying toward public as more companies realize that shared server architectures are generally more secure and cost-effective than privately maintained infrastructure. The beauty of cloud services is that, rather than pay for a mountain of storage that may only be fully utilized years later, one can simply pay for the storage used on an as-needed basis.
This is significant because a public cloud model represents a storage paradigm shift. When one adopts public cloud storage, there’s less (but still some) need to invest in and maintain local storage assets. The potential downside is slower performance; applications may be bottlenecked by network bandwidth and latency. Clearly, dedicated WAN connections help with this.

The benefits of cloud storage are now well-known and pervasive. However, having a cloud option is forcing businesses (and even high-end consumers) to reevaluate their storage strategies and how they tier data. Until recently, tiering was simple. The top tiers were filled with high-speed, high-capacity SSDs and high-RPM HDDs while the lower tiers were stocked with lower-RPM, high-capacity, low-cost HDDs. Cloud storage obviously can’t serve in Tier 0 or Tier 1 capacities, but it can fill in lower tiers quite well. However, many cloud providers, both public and private, have used consumer-grade drives in this application because of their low cost and high capacity.
The downside of consumer-grade drives is their lower duty cycle. Such drives are built to run for eight hours a day, five days a week, while enterprise drives are expected to run around the clock all year. Place consumer drives in an enterprise application and failure rates skyrocket, which translates into large and often unanticipated expenses for the provider. This is why drive manufacturers are starting to deliver new drive families built with consumer-type specs but engineered for enterprise-class endurance. For example, Seagate has its new Constellation CS, also called the Seagate Enterprise Value HDD. This is a 3 TB, 7200 RPM model built for a 24x7 duty cycle. Not surprisingly, the drive prices much closer to the consumer-oriented Barracuda than, say, the traditional Constellation series.
In short, cloud storage has created a new need in the storage market that is mostly invisible to users. In 2012, vendors moved to start filling that need. As adoption increases, the result will be lower infrastructure costs for providers that, hopefully, will result in lower pricing for customers.