AT&T to offer cloud storage service
AT&T will soon offer an on-demand storage service that will be accessible to enterprise customers through an Internet-based portal.
The AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service, which is being trialed with select customers, is expected to be available in the third quarter. Users will be able to "store, distribute and retrieve data as needed" through a Web-based user portal, the company says. AT&T has deployed the service at all of its Internet Data Centers in the United States and the company says it eventually plans to deploy it at its global IDCs as well.
AT&T touts three advantages of its storage-as-a-service approach. First, it allows enterprises to store data in the AT&T cloud rather than making capital investments in their own storage capacity. Second, it offers flexibility to companies that have volatile or fluctuating storage needs. And finally, AT&T says that its service can often provide data "at a fraction of the cost of managing data over a dedicated storage area network." As Gartner analyst Adam Couture has noted, the initial attraction to cloud-based storage systems "has been staggering cost differential between traditional storage offerings and cloud storage."
AT&T is relying on EMC to provide the underlying platform for it storage service. Specifically, AT&T is using EMC's Atmos technology, which is designed to help service providers build and develop cloud storage systems.
Cloud computing services use Internet technologies to deliver IT-related capabilities directly to users. As a recent Network World FAQ noted, cloud computing is "an approach to building IT services that harnesses the rapidly increasing horsepower of servers as well as virtualization technologies that combine many servers into large computing pools and divide single servers into multiple virtual machines that can be spun up and powered down at will."
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I like the article you have written. Still many problems persist with the ASP model of Storage provisioning to customers.1. Agree with SMB's probably cannot afford cost of Large storage frames. But there are smaller storage frames that exists but the issue of support contracts what makes the price goes up even further. That varies from company to company. There is often the issue of providing such space.
If Co-lo's cannot provide them with that cost efficiency what makes AT&T offering better than those? Other than the infrastructure being in place. For AT&T to survive the cost of doing this will need many SMB's to buy in on the idea.
2. Security - Good questions from SMB's needs to be asked about how secure the data is on AT&T. AT&T is a major corporation and stealing data is big business. But it takes extremely power systems with the right knowledge and code to hack systems these days but still physical security is a questions most often is hardly ever questioned by an SMB. Is the data path secured? I attended a SAN class last year where the instructor was asked to breached their SANs environment. He was given no restriction on how this could be done. You know how it was done by physical security being breached. It is issues like this that occurs more often than you think. Some companies don't plan well enough for security purposes on how their data paths are secured.
The security guard I believed was fired.
3. There been other ASP storage cloud services that exists today in which individuals are allowed to backup their data.
This good for consultants who travel but they are at risks in doing so cause the data may breached which may contained their client sensitive data.
4. What do SMB's needs and why is storage important? That a good question. Often they need a web front end often provided by almost any ISP's today but if an SMB goes out and get their own web server there is the cost of setup and maintaining plus the securing it. When if a Storage Cloud is used for this as well mean understanding how to secure that data as well.
In my opinion while the objective of the storage cloud is meant well and does offer some good value. The most important issue is security of that data. Also how well is that data backed up so restores can happen without any data lost. Data lost to any business can be disastrous depending on the size of the business. The old question of "How much is your data worth?" usually comes with customers who do not backup their data and now this option brings that question to the customer who risks loosing their business because of the chosen strategy.
I was told be careful what you wish for you just might get it.