Why Cloud Storage Use Could Be Limited in Enterprises

[ Thanks to Paul Shread for this link. ]

"The ideal for cloud storage is to be self-managed, self-balanced and self-replicated, with regular data checksums to account for the undetectable or mis-corrected error rates of various storage technologies. Cloud storage depends on being able have multiples copies of files managed and checksummed and verified regularly, distributed across the storage cloud for safekeeping.

"It's a great idea, but it faces more than a few challenges, such as reliability, security, data integrity, power, and replication time and costs. But one of the biggest issues is simply that hardware is going to break. There are two ways disk and tape drives break:

* Hitting the hard error rate of the media, which is expressed in average number of bits before an error occurs
* Hitting the Annualized Failure Rate (AFR) of a device based on the number of hours used

"The most common type of failure is known as the vendor's bit error rate. The bit error rate is the expected failures per number of bits moved. The following is generally what is published by vendors:"

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• RAID's Days May Be Numbered(Sep 18, 2009)
• The New Windows vs. Linux Debate(Sep 17, 2009)
• Will KVM KO Xen? (Sep 10, 2009)
• Enterprise Technologies Will Change the Consumer PC Market(Aug 30, 2009)
• SSDs, pNFS Will Test RAID Controller Design(Jul 25, 2009)
• Falling 10GbE Prices Spell Doom for Fibre Channel(Jun 18, 2009)
• File System Benchmarks Need to be Reformed(Jun 06, 2009)
• Nehalem Cracks the Virtual Glass Ceiling(Apr 02, 2009)
• Will SLES Make Virtualization Ubiquitous?(Apr 01, 2009)