What is cloud storage

Dell Technologies Cloud Storage solutions are providing enterprises with a wide variety of options for storing data while improving accessibility, reducing costs, enhancing disaster recovery and achieving faster time-to-deployment. But what is cloud storage exactly, and how can organizations best take advantage of cloud storage technology in hybrid cloud environments? Here is a brief overview of the concepts, benefits and terminology involved in cloud storage solutions.

Dell Technologies Cloud storage is a data storage architecture in which data is sent to a remote data center where it is managed, backed up and made accessible to users via the internet or a dedicated network connection. Cloud data storage is built on a virtualized infrastructure, providing a shared pool of resources that offer remarkable elasticity and scalability.

With Dell Technologies Cloud storage, organizations can reduce costs by paying only for the resources they consume rather than paying to purchase, install and manage storage infrastructure on-premises. Cloud storage enables enterprises to rapidly provision or release resources, scaling up or down quickly as business and data requirements demand. Cloud storage also enables data to be accessed from anywhere through an internet connection, and it provides an easy way to establish a disaster recovery plan by keeping a second copy of data in an off-site cloud storage location.

Cloud object storage is a cloud storage architecture that manages data as objects rather than as files. Rather than storing data in a directory tree with folders and subfolders, object storage uses objects that contain data, metadata and a globally unique identifying number. Object storage is ideal for cloud applications because of its massive scalability, its accessibility via a common application programming interface and its ability to use a namespace that can span multiple instances of physical hardware.

Multi-cloud storage is a storage architecture where data is stored on multiple cloud platforms to improve redundancy, reduce costs and increase performance.

Hybrid cloud storage is a cloud storage architecture that stores data in multiple cloud platforms, both public and private, while viewing and managing storage resources as a single homogenous system. By enabling data to be easily moved between storage in public and private clouds, IT teams can optimize storage for cost, performance, security and latency.

Managing multiple public and private cloud storage solutions can present an enormous challenge for IT teams. Each storage platform has its own tools, processes, service level agreements and security posture. Moving data between platforms can be complex, time-consuming and risky. To simplify management of hybrid cloud storage, organizations need solutions that provide a common set of tools that enable easy integration, faster data mobility, high-speed performance and flexible consumption options across a wide range of private and public cloud infrastructure.

As a global leader in enterprise data storage solutions, Dell Technologies provides a range of industry-leading cloud storage technology.

Dell Technologies offers cloud storage solutions that are pre-tested and validated to work with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on VxRail, the platform at the heart of Dell Technologies Cloud solutions. These cloud storage solutions with validated designs include:

• Dell EMC PowerMax. As the world’s fastest data storage array, PowerMax provides end-to-end NVMe, storage class memory, real-time machine learning and bandwidth up to 350 GB per second. PowerMax features a powerful architecture with true scale-out design, simple operations that consolidate everything on a single array, and trusted innovation to meet the highest levels of automation, AI or machine learning, data protection and availability.
• Dell EMC Unity XT. As a midrange storage solution, Dell EMC Unity XT delivers unified storage speed and efficiency with all-flash and hybrid flash arrays. With compelling simplicity, all-inclusive software, blazing speed and optimized efficiency, Dell EMC Unity XT cloud storage solutions offer multi-cloud enablement with a modern NVMe-ready design to meet the needs of resource-strained IT professionals in large or small companies. A 5:1 data reduction adds efficiency and more effective capacity, and flexible cloud consumption options make Unity XT ideal for storage in cloud deployments.

Dell Technologies also offers a range of cloud-enabled storage solutions.

• Dell EMC Unity Cloud Edition and Cloud Tiering Appliance provide tools to deploy a virtual storage appliance in the cloud or to tier storage to the cloud automatically.
• Dell EMC Isilon CloudPools software enables automatic tiering based on policy and seamlessly integrates with the cloud to create an additional storage tier for Isilon clusters.
• ClarityNow delivers a unified view of all object and file storage residing on-premises and in the cloud.
• CloudIQ enables IT teams to monitor, analyze and troubleshoot storage environments through health monitoring, insights and analytics.
• Dell EMC Cloud Data Protection solutions manage tiering for long-term retention in the cloud, enable backup and recovery to the cloud and protect workloads running in the cloud.

Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services provide Storage-as-a-Service solutions that deliver scalable, resilient cloud-attached storage with flexible multi-cloud access. Cloud Storage Services from Dell Technologies deliver all the benefits of enterprise-grade data security, performance, replication, capacity and availability in the public cloud. With Dell Technologies, IT teams can leverage storage in their preferred clouds and easily switch between them at any time based on the needs of applications while maximizing control, security and resiliency of cloud data.