Cloud Computing: Is It “A Commodity Bare Metal Storage World?”
October 31, 2014
Grazed from Forbes. Author: Tom Coughlin.
Many folks, particularly in the open source community, have been pushing for some time to move to commodity hardware with more sophisticated software to control that hardware rather than proprietary systems. This is true of servers, networking and also digital storage systems. Organizations such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and other hyperscale data center companies take this approach to a huge scale. In many of these environments functions, such as virtualization, are often installed directly into a storage system rather than within a host operating system (referred to as a bare metal environment).
Companies such as Mirantis and SwiftStack, are open source software companies that recently raised $100 M and $16 M to increase their penetration in the cloud computing and cloud storage markets. Other companies, such as Storient offer low cost private cloud storage capabilities that they say can scale to Exabyte storage environments…
Many other young companies offer cloud storage capabilities, such as Zadara, Scality, DDN, Quantum, Avere and many others. Object storage is the leading way to store large volumes of less frequently used content or content that can live with longer latencies…
Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2014/10/30/is-it-a-commodity-bare-metal-storage-world/