A new employee recently asked me to describe the benefits of cloud storage.  I decided the best way to describe the benefits is to discuss the problems one has without the virtualization provided by the cloud.  There are several problems that the storage administrator will have to cope with:
PROBLEM: Un-Planned Hardware Outages - There are numerous common server hardware failures that can result in service outages: hard drives, motherboards, power supplies, network cards. etc…  Each of these vulnerabilities has a point solution.  Our administrator can buy redundant power supplies, for instance, and cable his lab redundantly to take advantage of that.  This is expensive and labor intensive.
Cloud storage solves all of these potential hardware outages by allowing you to keep multiple copies of your data on different servers.  The cloud knows about these copies and can redirect data traffic to redundant copies in the event of any hardware failure.  So here are the first two benefits of cloud storage:
BENEFIT 1.) Hardware Redundancy
BENEFIT 2.) Automatic Storage Failover
PROBLEM: Planned Outages - Disks fill up.  Processors get faster.  Networks get faster.  Operating system versions and patches are released.  Hardware drivers are patched.  All of these inevitable planned upgrades require the administrator to take a traditional storage host offline.
Cloud storage solves this problem too with benefits #1 and #2.  Because clients are not directly dependent on a single server, administrators can take a host offline to upgrade it non-disruptively.  This brings us to the next benefit:
BENEFIT 3.) Outage-Free Hardware Upgrades
PROBLEM: Over-Provisioning - Administrators buy more disk space than they initially need to accommodate future data growth.  They pay for the storage long before they need it.
Cloud storage solves this problem with indirection.  Because from the storage client’s point of view there is no direct hardware dependency, a virtual storage container can be provisioned that is larger than the physical space available.  Customers can drastically reduce over-provisioning in a pay-as-you-go model and save on their electric bills into the bargain.  This is an especially attractive feature for storage service providers because they can provide peak storage to their customers just-in-time.  The resulting cloud benefits are:
BENEFIT 4.) Thin Provisioning
BENEFIT 5.) Greener Data Centers
BENEFIT 6.) Peak Burst Capacity
PROBLEM: Capacity Limits - No matter how many disk drives an administrator packs behind a host, there is still only one host.  Some hosts will allow multiple network cards and multiple processors, but once all the slots are full, they’ve reached their capacity to scale with data growth.
Cloud storage solves the scalability problem.  It provides the means to scale processor power, network bandwidth, and storage capacity in parallel.  The administrator simply adds more storage hosts to the cloud to scale along all the dimensions simultaneously.  So the next benefit is:
BENEFIT 7.) Parallel Scalability
PROBLEM: Physical Silos - Because traditional storage is based on exported volumes and volumes are physical, if a client wants access to storage that spans multiple storage hosts, it has to mount them all.  This is especially difficult for applications like indexing software that need to see all the data to build their search indexes.
Cloud storage provides a single global namespace that allows clients the possibility to access the entire storage pool from a single mountpoint.  That’s an important benefit:

BENEFIT 8.) Global Namespace
PROBLEM: Workload Hotspots - With multiple clients and servers, unbalanced workloads are inevitable.  Some servers will be underworked and some will be overworked.
The indirection provided by cloud storage allows the cloud to balance primary and backup workloads among the storage hosts to achieve maximum performance and storage density, thereby alleviating hotspots.  So there’s another benefit:
BENEFIT 9.) Load Balancing
PROBLEM: Managing Hosts - Traditional host storage requires the storage on each node to be managed individually.  Volume or partition exports, for instance, are managed on a per host basis.
All of the preceding benefits make the administrators job easier.  In addition, cloud storage further empowers the administrator by facilitating exports from a single administrative interface and providing a unified view of storage utilization.  That’s the final major benefit:
BENEFIT 10.) Easy Administration
The foregoing are the top 10 reasons cloud storage will continue to gain popularity.  Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS) provides all of these benefits and more, making it the right choice for the current explosion of Tier II data.

Todd Shoenfelt
Parascale Lead QA Engineer