For all but the most curmudgeonly luddites among us, it’s become totally clear: “The cloud” is here to stay. The power and ubiquity of distributed compute and storage is all around us – at home, at work, and in our social lives.
Recent advances in virtualization have brought us compute efficiency, storage consolidation, and system redundancy that were nearly unimaginable just 10 years ago. As a former IT guy, those benefits were always the promise of virtualization, but they seemed like a futuristic fantasy.
A decade ago, my corporate file store consisted of primary storage with three disk shelves of expensive, fast spinning disks to store backed-up data for 30 days. Then I had a filer to track what data was “fresh” and what was “stale.” Stale data was moved to secondary storage, which consisted of many more shelves of much slower disks. Then, after 90 days, all data was copied via a (totally awesome and very expensive) tape robot that whipped and whizzed tapes around inside a big ol’ refrigerator-sized enclosure in my datacenter.