What's the point of a cloud storage gateway? What exactly is a cloud storage gateway? We know what direct-access storage (DAS) is, and understand SANs and NAS, forms of networked storage. Cloud storage is, obviously, storage in the cloud. But when, where, how and why do we need a cloud gateway for storage? We can envisage a four-layer IT stack and three kinds of IT-as-a- …
Totally agree.....none of the people using the term "cloud something" seem to understand the origin of it.
The whole point of using the word "cloud" was there is nothing there....except a transport link between
two places . Those two places would house the routers, servers etc. which enable the provision of services.
Tiered storage is nothing new, Fujitsu and other mainframe vendors have been doing Hierarchical storage for decades. "cloud gateway" storage might replace tape storage, but it does not address the big-picture of making location transparent storage, which is more a traditional data-centre issue than a "cloudy" one.
Ppl want the opposite. They want to access THEIR own PC (read: personal server) from their phone, tablet. They don't want to offload everything to some stupid web-storage and access that stuff from there. They do it (read: tolerate) because there's nothing else.
What should be developped is something like DLNA over the Internet.
As for services. Appart from email, filling in tax forms and PC banking there's little cloud-stuff that is really usefull. While some of these can hardly be described as "cloud service" but more of a front-end for CMS.
I guess the word cloud is being abused just as any other buzz-word.
re: Manu T
"As for services. Appart from email, filling in tax forms and PC banking there's little cloud-stuff that is really usefull."
I don't even know how to respond to such a ridiculous statement. Your completely unfounded comments about what people "want" aside, let's tackle your most ludicrous assertion.
You're either a complete moron or you fancy yourself a bit of an IT pro because you installed your own anti-virus software (once) and read El Reg.
Thinking about just one particular IaaS vendor with a disposition for all things rainforest related, there's a HUGE chunk of the internet running on "the Cloud".
Oh, and fancy doing some serious number crunching but don't want to buy a huge cluster to do it? If only there was a Cloud-based Hadoop service I could use.
That reminds me, I really need to setup a database but don't know too much about it.. If only there was some way to use a Relational Database without having to employ a DBA to help me.
Sadly, I don't think there's a spell-checker in "the Cloud" yet which obviously you would benefit greatly from.
Or just stop posting crap.
The CSP is the small part of lock-in concerns. Transferring data between CSPs can be accomplished through a number of means, however certain techniques such as deduplication that gateway providers commonly employ is a far greater form of lock-in. Dedup techniques are proprietary and from a usability perspective, using it is the same as encrypting your data with a key only the vendor knows. It means you're forever required to use the gateway to access your content on the CSP. Unfortunate, because one of the biggest benefits of these storage platforms is the flexibility of using the API with any number of applications (be it a gateway to expose CIFS/NFS, for distribution through a CDN, big data processing using hadoop, etc.).
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