On a Cloud High

Cloud
has always been associated with flexibility and economic viability.
Cloud has successfully shrugged the hype factor and has over the
years grown well in India. Currently most of the cloud market is
addressed by Indian data center service providers and global cloud
service providers. However telecom companies are taking significant
share in overall cloud opportunity with strengths like broad network
reach and wide customer access. From the time, telecom companies have
started considering cloud as a serious business concept, storage
companies have been their 'friend in need'. While storage has
been a de-facto component of the cloud architecture, telcos have been
leveraging the relationship for the best business advantage. An
effective combination of storage companies and telcos are bringing
the great 'cloud dividend'. Telcos have a unique standing to
provide managed cloud services. The telecom companies have networks
and longterm relationships with their customers, which the
competitors don't have. Combining a teleco's knowledge of
customers with a service offering of storage companies makes a good
business value proposition. Cloud can have a major impact on the
digital assets by scalability and flexibility to develop
cost-effective test systems, at the same time allowing enterprises to
rent infrastructure and develop applications. It is the wireless
cloud, with its gamut of services like storage, security, etc, that
is having a huge impact on uptake, and in turn digital assets.

The Symbiosis

Storage
vendors
have been working relentlessly to make alterations to fit in
the cloud model that is being structured by the telecos. Telcos'
inclination to rope in the storage vendors can never be
underestimated by any accounts. Storage is not simply about about the
physical capability of storing bits. It is usually the central
enabler of a business. Storage can be aptly seen as the lifeline of
an organization and has come far from containing customer records,
financial records, and the intellectual property of the company. They
are the backbone of an enterprise.

Infrastructure
services
that are one of the popular cloud services, are becoming
cloud based which includes storage, content management, conferencing,
processing bandwidth, and network connectivity. Cloud platforms are
being scaled to accommodate the growth in the network traffic levels.
“Enterprises across the region have very different requirements
when they look for the latest cloud solutions because of local market
conditions. The Hitachi Data Systems' cloud approach is unique in
allowing organizations in Asia Pacific to build, scale and deploy
agile cloud services and solutions at their own pace to meet existing
needs,” says Kevin Eggleston, senior VP and GM, Asia Pacific,
Hitachi Data Systems. Rajesh Awasthi, director, telecom and cloud
service provider, NetApp, says, “Telcos with their intrinsic
networks and the storage companies with their expert domain knowledge
are helping the telecom companies to serve the best breed of cloud
services”

Technology
Beckons

Let
us have a look at the innovative new offerings made by the storage
companies. HP has invested with telecom companies in delivering
various workshops which helped telecom companies in defining their
cloud strategy and cloud services delivery roadmap. The company has
also put in R&D investments in building an integrated solution
for telecom providers to enable them to become cloud service
providers. The company has also built a program called CloudAgile,
which will help in building GTM for the cloud services, in turn
helping telecom providers achieving quicker RoI for their cloud
investments. Another storage company, Oracle recently announced 2
models of Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud-Oracle Exalogic Elastic
Cloud X2-2 with 64-bit x86 processors and a choice of Oracle Solaris
or Oracle Linux, as well as Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud T3-1B with
SPARC servers running Oracle Solaris. The offerings are engineered
for large-scale, mission-critical deployments, Oracle Exalogic
Elastic cloud provides the foundation for enterprise-class
multi-tenancy or cloud applications and can support thousands of
applications. All Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud models are hardware
and software systems that leverage an InfiniBand based I/O fabric and
solid-state storage with the market-leading Oracle WebLogic Server
and other enterprise Java Oracle middleware products, which are
assembled, tested, and tuned at the factory to dramatically reduce
the time from machine delivery to being fullyoperational for
application deployment.

IBM
also designed IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) to
embrace cloud storage and the petabyte age. It can meet today's
storage challenges with quick and costeffective IT-enabled business
enhancements designed to grow with unprecedented scale. For EMC, the
company designed Atmos to manage information for content-rich
highscale infrastructures and cloud service provider environments.
Its flexible architecture adapts easily to run in virtualized
environments, or within
an EMC purpose-built, low-cost, highdensity hardware system. The new
Atmos 2.0 is armed with brand new features for managing big data.
NetApp along with telcos also work in partnership with cloud vendors
like Oracle on Demand and SAP by Design, for providing cloud services
to the telecom companies.

Innovations Galore

Most
of the data centers for storage built by current telecom service
providers are typically made considering telecom requirements.
However cloud services' data center have typical requirements like
higher power and lower opex. Explains Venkatesh Iyer, head, VCE,
India & Saarc, EMC, “As organizations expand server
virtualization to include mission-critical applications, ongoing VM
creation, movement and use of virtual networking introduces new
challenges for data center managers when they need to isolate and
resolve infrastructure issues.”

There
have been innovations made to suit the requirements of the enterprise
by scaling up the capacity of the data centers. Telecom companies
have been, of late, also gone for data centers meant especially for
cloud services. BSNL, last year announced plans to build 6 data
centers across India to sell cloud storage services in the country.
Going by the agreement, BSNL will partner with Datacraft Asia to
build, operate and manage 6 data center facilities. BSNL and
Datacraft will jointly sell
the managed hosted and cloud 'IT-as-a-Service' from these
facilities under the brand 'onecloud'. Indian cloud service
providers also have to compete with global service providers on
commercials,
this demands lowest possible operating expenditure for delivering
cloud services.

Security as a Priority

Security
and
privacy of data are the most important concerns, the reason why
some users are fence-sitting before migrating to the cloud. Pratik
Chube, country general manager, product management & marketing,
Emerson Network Power (India) says, “A clearly defined SLA and
strict adherence to it can minimize the risk posed by the pilferage
of sensitive data. Depending on the SLA signed and the domain
expertise of the third party host, it is fairly safe.”

Supports
Santanu
Ghose, country head, Converge Infrastructure Solutions, HP
India, “Security is the most important consideration for cloud
service providers and cloud consumers.”

Security
has
been constantly an area of concern especially for the companies
that decide to go on the public cloud. It is mostly the bigger
enterprises that are able to go for hosted private model.

Way to Go

If
supported by the right management and vendors, cloud services can
help in giving a manifold growth to the enterprises. Better
management of data storage within cloud services can not only make
data access and retrieval simpler and quicker, it has the capability
to reduce the demand on storage space within the cloud, reduce the
demand on data transmission and therefore negate many of
the concerns over bandwidth demand that currently is holding up the
broader adoption of the cloud on a wider scale. Experts and analysts
believe that the cloud services will help in bringing better revenues
to the telecom companies. While both the segments, the storage
companies and telcos, gain profit from the venture, cloud services
are here to stay and grow.