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Contributed by Mohit Aron, CEO/Founder, Cohesity

Enterprises Will Invest in Hybrid Solutions for Secondary Storage Environments

There is an ongoing debate on the benefits of the cloud versus on-premises solutions for secondary storage. Cloud computing services have become a top priority for today's companies as a foundation for innovation and to reduce complexity. However, migrating all secondary storage to the cloud brings its own challenges, as it's needlessly expensive and cumbersome. Additionally, enterprises face additional challenges because they have data for different use cases spread across multiple silos. This storage fragmentation makes it difficult to get a complete picture of data usage and overall capacity, making it nearly impossible to evaluate what can or should be moved to the cloud.

A hyperconverged secondary storage platform eliminates data storage fragmentation and provides public and private cloud integrations that make shifting resources to the cloud more efficient. Furthermore, hybrid cloud makes managing the interplay between on-premises and cloud secondary storage more cost effective and flexible for enterprises. By utilizing hybrid cloud with a hyperconverged architecture, enterprises receive a unified, all-encompassing solution that leverages cloud services for greater efficiency.

To better understand the benefits of hybrid cloud for secondary storage, one can compare on-premises and cloud storage to buying a house versus renting a hotel room. Hotel rooms offer more flexibility than buying a house because it includes accommodations such as room service, cleaning services and more. Guests don't have to worry about ongoing maintenance or being stuck in a fixed location indefinitely. The downside? Renting a hotel room is costly and runs the risk of reduced quality, such as loud neighbors or small rooms, which is why a majority of people choose to live in a house or apartment.

In today's world, people are able to both own a house and stay at a hotel based on their needs. Similarly, enterprises can now have the best of both worlds and reap the benefits of the cloud and on-premises infrastructure. The ideal solution allows enterprises to rent the cloud for flexibility and operate on the data on-premises when quality is desired and costs need to be kept down.  

Enterprises are increasingly taking a hybrid cloud approach for their secondary storage workloads as cloud and on-premises solutions each offer their own unique advantages. The cloud provides flexibility and speed of deployment, while on-premises solutions offer greater security, control and cost savings. In 2017, we expect more vendors and customers to invest in a hybrid cloud architecture to achieve the best of both of best worlds and consolidate the various silos of on-premises and the cloud data. This will allow enterprises to more effectively consolidate their secondary storage workloads for complete storage visibility and resource efficiency.

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About the Author

Cohesity was founded in June 2013 by CEO Mohit Aron, who is regarded as the pioneer of hyper-convergence, the first architecture to converge compute and storage to simplify virtualization. Aron founded the infrastructure company Nutanix to bring hyper-convergence to market and served as its CTO before leaving to build Cohesity. Aron worked as a Staff Engineer at Google from 2003 to 2007, where he helped design the company's innovative Google File System. He also served as Architect at AsterData, a leading big data analytics company that was later acquired by Teradata.

Mohit holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.