If your data is burgeoning and your volumes are becoming unmanageable, it is time to get yourself some scalable storage. Virtualisation, no doubt is a first step, but it is just that—the first step. You need to take the logical next step and move to the cloud.
The cloud is designed to handle unstable workflows. The peaks and troughs in your data flow need no longer bother you. You can scale up your storage when data volumes peak, and scale it down when your data volumes dip, and you need to pay only for what you use! If you pause and consider the implications of this, you will appreciate the flexibility you gain thereby. Your legacy systems never allowed you to enjoy this luxury. They were designed for unchanging workflows and you had to spend hours anticipating the peaks and troughs in workflows and provisioning for the same. You had to maintain redundant resources to ensure that you did not find yourself short when peaks were encountered.
Die-hard fans of legacy systems will be quick to point out that there must be some kind of trade off involved. Perhaps, scalability will be provided at the cost of performance? Well, no. It is the legacy systems that create trade offs with performance. Legacy systems have monolithic controller architectures. When resources are shared, all the applications try to hog the available resources, creating noise and performance dips. If resources are to be dedicated to performance sensitive applications, a management nightmare is in the making. Resources will have to be hard wired to specific applications while other applications are starved for resources. The process can also result in storage fragmentation. Cloud architectures are designed to dedicate and release resources on demand. This results in optimum utilisation of resources and makes the resources available for other applications, as and when the demand is made. Storage fragmentation is never an issue as storage is never fragmented or permanently dedicated to any one application.
Cloud resource scalability extends to security scalability. Data is always encrypted, isolated and in synchronisation with standard security requirements. Comprehensive security can continue to be provided even when hardware resources are scaled up or down. This is in distinct contrast with legacy systems, where security cannot be scaled up or down on demand, and additional security can only be provided if physical resources are added to the data centre.
