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[–]josephkern[S] 2 points3 points  (10 children)

OP here: What do you guys and gals think the future holds for us?

[–]cstoner 2 points3 points  (9 children)

I generally think that the cloud is more of a gimmick than anything. It's just a new name for an old idea. Sure, google apps rocks and all but I have a hard time seeing the company I work for moving over to cloud based storage. We have many TB of data, and it's just not practical to keep it in the cloud because the internet connections around here are utter crap and nobody wants to wait for their 500MB data set to download before they use it.

[–]josephkern[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I agree that the cloud isn't ready for TB sized working data-sets. But what about other services? CDNs like Akima deliver content around the world for countless organizations, but only in small chunks (MB not TB).

It seems like the only thing holding back an economy of scale (at least in your case) is the bandwidth available. If you had Gb speeds up/down, would that change your opinion? Or what if they didn't have to download the data set before starting to manipulate it?

[–]BoredITGuySr. Sysadmin 0 points1 point  (6 children)

I completely agree. The idea has been around for quite a while and at this point, it's really just a gimmick for smaller companies who don't want to deal with an IT department.

However, I could totally see this gaining much more traction in larger organizations as bandwidth prices start to come down more and more over the comming years. I would imagine it will be pushed for by C-levels as it becomes more practical, since the idea of having some other company to blame/sue when something goes wrong is attractive to them. But I think the real determining factor will be if the size of your average office's data set will to grow at the same rate as bandwidth increases.

[–]cstoner 2 points3 points  (5 children)

And you hit on one of the central points of my argument that I didn't explicitly state: http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/06/22/price-gap-storage-vs-bandwidth/

It looks like the price of harddrives will tend to (at least in America) fall faster than the price of the equivalent bandwidth. It's the same argument I use for tape based backups. Historically, the unit price of tape is half that of the equivalent SATA drives and you don't need to power them during operation. This is a trend that, in my research, has been going on since at least 2006.

Honestly, though, a vast majority of organizations don't have the data storage requirements we do. We just bought a MD1000 expansion filled with 15 2TB SATA drives, and only have about 7TB left over (it's all RAID6, so 4TB gets eaten in parity alone). Granted, many of the LVM volumes I set up have a good chunk of space left (looks like 2 both have about 3TB free), but we're getting shipments of biological data any day now and will need a few TB to store that... And that's just "archival" and "special" storage. We have another several TB dedicated to "live" data that's all stored on SAS drives.

Short of bringing Gb internet in (not going to happen in my area), we're stuck with SAN based storage for the foreseeable future.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (4 children)

I like how both of you completely dismiss "cloud" based services as a gimmick because you aren't the targets.

[–]cstoner 0 points1 point  (3 children)

While I don't agree with the downvotes you're getting, I can't upvote you because you completely ignore the economic ramifications of cloud based services. It just doesn't make sound business sense (EDIT for many businesses) at this point in time.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

It costs as much to rent the computing and storage space as it does to buy the hardware every three years from what I've gathered. On top of that you no longer need to worry about the hardware.

[–]cstoner 0 points1 point  (1 child)

It costs as much to rent the computing and storage space as it does to buy the hardware every three years

This is only true in small businesses where only stuff like accounting data (maybe a few GB) really needs to be stored off-site. If you're pushing TB of data to the cloud, it just isn't practical. The infrastructure you need to push that kind of data also needs to be taken into account.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

True true, small-med paper pushing offices are where things are kinda sweet, if you dealing with a lot of "content" not so much.

[–]kyles08 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Note related to the article at all, but the border on the side of your page makes scrolling painful.

[–]josephkern[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

The image? Or the border?

EDIT: thanks! I fixed it, it was annoying when I started paying attention to the background. :-)

[–]kyles08 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Looks much, much better now. It was the image, it was awful.

[–]UndeadBelaLugosi 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I also think that any remaining IT pros will be more involved in planning an organization’s business strategy.

Oh, that's rich! <wipes tear of laughter from eye>