True hybrid enterprise cloud storage systems promise the best of both on-premises infrastructure and public cloud. They offer the performance, security and governance of local storage necessary for many mission-critical business applications -- not to mention the on-demand elastic scalability and utility economics of public clouds.
But finding true hybrid cloud tools to support critical, enterprise-class, database-driven applications can be difficult. This gaping hole in the market has left enterprise IT pros and business application owners stuck on legacy infrastructures.
However, there has been significant progress. #Oracle Cloud Converged Storage, released last month, integrates storage services across its database, enterprise applications, enterprise storage infrastructure and public cloud. Practically, its latest on-premises Oracle ZFS storage arrays internally and organically extend into public Oracle Cloud storage (which is also made up of ZFS storage arrays) -- no gateway integration or third-party software required.
#Oracle Cloud Converged Storage looks like what many of us thought hybrid storage was supposed to look like. Yet, no high-performance, enterprise storage system has ever actually delivered a true native hybrid cloud capability. Why haven't other vendors, such as #IBM and #DellEMC, offered hybrid cloud storage to leverage their enterprise storage and cloud tools? Those vendors require a hardware or software gateway to move data to the public cloud, unlike Oracle, which doesn't require one.
This failure to deliver what customers really want may be due to internal competition between legacy infrastructure and separately managed cloud divisions. Large storage vendors' revenue and profits have declined the past few years, due to factors such as the cloud, hyper-convergence and more software-defined products, a driving force behind Dell's EMC acquisition.
When enterprises want to evolve legacy architectures into modern hybrid storage, they simply don't want to deal with large bundles or bunches of parts and disparate cloud services that require integration. In a way, this is also about recognizing the market trend of how enterprises seek more convenient converged products in all their IT transformation projects.
True hybrid cloud storage should be simple to own and operate. Simplicity in IT inevitably leads to a lower total cost of ownership and lower risk, whereas complexity always increases implementation overhead, ongoing management costs and lowers service levels. While there are older approaches to hybridized storage services with external cloud gateway products, colocating private storage with public clouds (e.g., NetApp Private Storage) or accelerating data transfer (e.g., Attunity CloudBeam), these all add layers of technology and cause additional burdens to enterprises and database owners and operators.
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