Capacity in the Cloud

13.07.2009
Jeff Kubacki, CIO at Kroll Inc., set a goal for the risk management consulting firm Kroll Inc. to reduce its storage costs by 25% over the next three years. With some 13 petabytes of stored data to date, Kubacki plans to attack the problem with a mix of tiered storage, business process changes and newer options -- including cloud storage.

Though in its infancy, cloud storage seems like an attractive option, with its elasticity, utility-like billing, multiple storage locations and ability to pull data directly from the storage device. But the cloud is still uncharted territory when it comes to sending large chunks of data through the ether.

"Cloud is one of those things that we've been talking to our vendors about to see when it might make sense for us to put our toe in the water," Kubacki says. "We're still just figuring out if it's going to be right for us."

Kroll's IT architects will be investigating ways to migrate about 25% of the risk assessment firm's eligible data through its Internet "pipes" and into the cloud. (The majority of data, mostly legal discovery documents, is considered too sensitive to store in the cloud, Kubacki says.) While storage capacity in the cloud is expandable, limits in the capacity of network connections to the cloud can create challenges for enterprises with multiple petabytes of data to move back and forth.

Enterprises are asking whether their pipes are big enough to transfer their stored data to the cloud, and often, the answer is no. "The latency is the big inhibitor for what you can use [cloud] storage for," says Adam Couture, an analyst at Gartner Inc. "Right now, for enterprises, we see the [use restricted to] archiving, backup, maybe some collaboration."

But most cloud providers say there are easy ways around capacity issues when migrating data to the cloud -- starting with the physical migration of the initial data to the data center location.