It’s official.  According to Gartner, external controller-based disk storage has recovered from the global recession, exceeding the record sales figure from 2008 with revenue in 2010 of more than $19.4 billion (US).  Analyst Roger Cox commented that “enterprises and service providers alike are investing more in external storage as they virtualize servers and build cloud-based services.”

Here’s my prediction: the storage required to support the Clouds will remain too expensive until Clouds move to a hardware independent software-based storage virtualization model.

As with virtual desktops, potential private cloud customers are experiencing “sticker shock” due to demanding storage requirements.  This has slowed commercial interest.  Clouds by definition are software constructs that provide services as needed when needed.  To do so, the combination of virtual servers, virtual storage and virtual networks working together as a combined virtualization layer is the obvious choice.

From our perspective, a cloud computing platform needs to, at its very core, be based on portable software.  Many clouds currently are being built from a hardware vendor-specific mindset.  So, what is wrong with this picture?  Well, the whole point of cloud computing is delivering cost-effective services to users – and that requires the highest degree of flexibility and openness, versus being boxed in to specific hardware that cannot adapt to change over time.  Aren’t clouds, after all, supposed to be soft and agile?"

Don’t take my word for it, though.  Here’s what some of our cloud provider customers have said publicly:

Host.net: “We chose VMware for server virtualization, DataCore for storage virtualization and Cisco for network virtualization in the core design of our vPDC platform because each vendor delivers the very best virtualization component in their respective areas of competence," said Jeffrey Slapp, VP of Virtualization Services for Host.net.  “We are finding that the demand for storage far outpaces the demand for individual virtual systems. With DataCore’s software-based technology, we can deliver a highly flexible storage solution both to the customers of our cloud who are using virtual servers, and to the clients who are still utilizing physical servers in our data centers.”

IOmart: “What we have achieved with DataCore is total flexibility, we can now move data ‘at will’ between vendors and seamlessly achieve virtualization across RAID arrays. No other solution offers us this,” states Richard McMahon, IOmart Infrastructure Manager.

Data growth will continue to be the biggest infrastructure cost challenge.  However, the most important strategic driver in 2011 will be building business continuity and availability into the infrastructure as whole instead of device by device.  Without the umbrella of a software virtualization infrastructure for storage, inevitably, continued data growth can’t be managed safely and affordably.