Transitioning From The Enterprise To The Cloud

By Juergen Urbanski

Q: Jeff, what percentage of enterprise IT demand for storage will be fulfilled by service provider (i.e., external) clouds in 3-5 years? What drives that?

A: In 2014, 80% of new storage capacity and 50% of spend may go to the cloud, driven by the complexity crisis you laid out. The opex for sustaining IT is driving the majority of TCO, even though disk and array prices continue to decline. Most IT organizations will lack the time, budget or experience that will be required to successfully fulfill their own storage needs. Against that, we can deliver our service to customers at one fifth to one tenth the TCO of equivalent NAS-class enterprise storage arrays, assuming street pricing and a 3-year depreciation cycle.

Q: What percentage of enterprise IT demand for storage will be fulfilled by enterprise (i.e., private) clouds in 3-5 years?

A: Longer term we expect to see very few private clouds in the general enterprise space, except for government and perhaps some extreme high performance computing situations. I doubt the average enterprise customer will be able to successfully buy, configure, deploy, manage and grow a private storage cloud. If they couldn’t keep up with data growth in the legacy world, in spite of attempts to standardize on fewer vendor products and interfaces and more storage monitoring and management, what makes anyone think they will be able to handle more hardware, more variable performance components, more monitoring that would be typical of a private cloud?

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