The Cloud, page-2

Ok, I think you may have bought off on the hype of the C word a little too much.

At the end of the day "the Cloud" is a bunch of generic computers and storage sitting in a data centre sucking power and needing connectivity. Some of the subscription service model and provisioning changes but the underpinning doesnt.

In fact the bulk of data still lives inside commercial or government enterprises in their own facilities and before you object I'd point out that Google has cloud services, but their own commercial data is reserved inside Google for its own ends, and the same for Amazon. It runs a cloud business and the Amazon business may be a customer of its own cloud services but it is essentially enterprise data for its own use.

Much as it was when the C word was not in the common vernacular. In fact, the bulk of system in "the Cloud" are the same systems doing the same job in largely the same way as they were before. Running applications.

Yes data is growing quickly, but that has nothing to do with any intrinsic quality of "the Cloud", data storage is storage.

Reality. Tape is still the cheapest long term storage still. High capacity slower disk has eaten into that and other hierarchies such as redundant pools of SSD with n+1 replication have also found favour in certain environments or as tiers of a more complete storage hierarchy.

Now WBT have said we can meet a 10year retention. So it should be a more viable replacement for Flash in an SSD type device. If the perfomance is better as promised, and we heard low power today, then it may be that is forms part of an improved storage hierarchy in the data centre (cloud or not).