Modern enterprises require increasingly dynamic and distributed infrastructures that utilize resources on-premises and in the cloud. By employing virtualized and cloud-native technologies, applications and workloads can run wherever the necessary resources are available. However, this requires high flexibility in the underlying IT infrastructure.
The effective use of cloud storage plays a significant role in meeting the growing demand for flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency in IT systems. Cloud storage enables dynamic and on-demand management of available storage capacities. Cloud interfaces allow virtual storage pools to be expanded on demand, or new storage classes can be added for specific workload requirements.
At the same time, performance-critical applications can be run with low latency through distributed storage and networking with local on-premises storage systems. This article highlights the key aspects of enterprise cloud storage and its implementation by leading manufacturers in hybrid storage solutions, focusing particularly on the seamless integration of cloud resources into existing on-premises infrastructures.
Enterprise cloud storage is specifically tailored to the needs of comprehensive corporate IT. In addition to unlimited scalability, professional cloud storage services offer high availability through redundant data storage across various data center locations.
Data is distributed across these locations using software-defined storage mechanisms such as replication, erasure coding, or triple-parity. This ensures data availability—even during a site failure due to natural disasters or other incidents.
Automated tiering functions analyze access patterns and data content in real-time. Based on this analysis, data can be distributed across different storage classes with varying latency and throughput levels. Manual regulations can also manage special cases, leading to cost-effective resource use.
Object and file storage are provided in common formats such as S3, NFS, or SMB. This ensures that established tools and applications remain usable and that existing on-premises storage can continue to be utilized. At the same time, existing IT benefits from the virtually unlimited capacity of the cloud as data volumes increase and innovative workloads such as media or engineering databases emerge.
Enterprise cloud storage offers significant advantages over local storage solutions. Capacity can be rented as a virtualized block or object storage on demand rather than purchased and managed as physical storage media.
This eliminates the need for extensive capacity planning. Instead, the cloud allows dynamic scaling based on actual demand. Data storage is also independent of local hardware, significantly increasing failure safety through data distribution across multiple redundant locations.
Using sophisticated tiering algorithms and policy engines, inactive or infrequently used data is automatically moved to cost-effective cloud storage areas. This leads to efficient storage utilization and frees up valuable resources in the high-performance on-premises area.
By integrating cloud storage into a virtual, hybrid pool model, unified storage management can be realized across all levels. Reporting tools provide a consolidated overview of total capacity, enabling elastic provisioning and cost optimization.
Leading storage providers like NetApp have responded to these requirements by expanding their portfolios to include comprehensive cloud storage integration and hybrid data management solutions.
Their concepts transparently link established on-premises storage systems such as SANs (Storage Area Networks), hyper-converged infrastructures, or DAS (Direct Attached Storage) with public cloud storage resources from major public clouds. This provides unified, virtualized storage pools across on-premises and cloud environments.
The providers' management software takes over the fully automatic workload-adaptive data tiering between various levels. Through a unified namespace concept, requests from applications and users are forwarded to the optimal storage level.
High performance, security, and data sovereignty benefits are realized through local on-premises systems, the cloud's elasticity, and unlimited capacity. Even demanding workloads from areas such as media, engineering, or research are efficiently supported.
Overall, using such integrated hybrid storage solutions enables the dynamic, cost-effective, and highly available provision of complex enterprise infrastructures in the future.
Cloud storage is a central pillar of modern hybrid IT infrastructures. As this article has shown, consolidating enterprise cloud storage, cloud backup storage, Azure cloud storage, AWS cloud storage, and other public cloud storage offerings enables scalable, flexible, and cost-efficient provisioning of digital resources.
By seamlessly integrating with on-premises storage and automating workload-adaptive data tiering between these areas, even the most demanding workloads from fields such as engineering or research are efficiently supported. With elastic capacities from the cloud and high-security standards through local systems, the highest requirements are also met for availability, performance, and data protection.
Overall, NetApp's hybrid storage solutions open new possibilities for your company to future-proof IT dynamically and flexibly. The cloud-based approach ensures the innovation of modern infrastructures and the competitiveness of critical business processes, even in times of constant change.
Do you have technical questions about StorageGRID or Object Storage? Refer to the NetApp Guide for StorageGRID Systems and the Object Storage documentation for the answers you need.