Reading Tea Leaves on Storage's Future
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The fact that leading storage vendor EMC is getting serious about cloud computing signifies that cloud computing is likely to be adopted by large companies, eventually. |
EMC this week tapped Microsoft executive Paul Maritz to run a division to develop storage services delivered over the Web. EMC also said it will buy Pi Corp., a privately held start-up founded by Maritz that's developing software to let users create, repurpose, store, share and access personal information in new ways.
Cloud computing—in which users access software or storage over the Internet—is employed mostly by individuals and small businesses. Some larger firms are dabbling in cloud computing, but at the moment, and the foreseeable future, big enterprises will mostly rely on traditional ways to access applications and storage. Still, as we've seen in other types of technologies—wireless, for instance—larger firms eventually adopt IT individuals and small firms use.
Still, any widespread switch to cloud storage for larger enterprises remains years away. In the meantime, managing storage internally is rapidly changing as virtualization and green IT initiatives take hold. Those challenges will have a big impact on corporate data centers.
To find out the latest on data center trends, please consider attending Ziff Davis Enterprise's Data Center Summit in New York on March 13.
