The Storage Economist: Hybrid Cloud Economics

InsightaaS: David Merrill, Chief Economist for HDS (a new InsightaaS sponsor!) writes a regular blog series under the heading “The Storage Economist,” in which he examines the overall financial impact of different storage technologies and storage management strategies. In “Hybrid Cloud Economics,” he examines the difference between “DIY” cloud storage strategies predicated on moving data to public cloud, and Hitachi’s HCP Cloud systems that provide for integrated/hybrid storage solutions. After careful analysis, Merrill concludes that “the time is right for highly integrated hybrid clouds.”

Over the last 5-6 years, I have done extensive modeling and writing about the economics of storage (and VM) in the cloud. Like most vendors, we have worked to find defensive positions against public cloud offerings. These public offerings offer an extremely low consumption price, and that has been attractive to many, despite the variety of technical and business concerns with public clouds. Most of my own economic work has been to define total costs of cloud options, as compared to hosting infrastructure in your own data center. Not surprisingly, there is always a cross-over point where the sweet spot begins or ends for any technology.

Over the years, I have built several public and HDS-use models to compare cloud options for:

  • Tier 4 very low cost storage
  • Archive and backup storage
  • Very long term (50-100 years) data retention
  • Cross-over points for private and public cloud architectures
  • And a few others that I have probably forgotten…

In the early days of cloud adoption, there was a significant shift in costs by moving to the cloud, with questionable results relative to if hard costs really went down…

Read the entire post: http://blogs.hds.com/david/2014/06/hybrid-cloud-economics.html

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