PRO+ Premium Content/Storage

The delivery of storage as a service has advanced considerably over the years. Today, public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure offer object storage on demand for internal and external connectivity, as well as block and file storage for internal assignment to compute instances. This operational flexibility would be highly attractive in the data center, offering convenience and agility well beyond traditional methods of storage deployment. How do you go about building your own private storage cloud? To start, let's take a step back and review what cloud computing really means. The standard definition of cloud covers the following characteristics: elasticity to grow and shrink consumed resources; delivery as a service, a standard set of service offerings defined in abstract terms rather than on physical hardware; multi-tenancy to support multiple clients; on-demand access for requesting resources with little or no manual intervention; and reporting and billing, with detailed reports for charging based on ...