HITS

Depending on your organization’s storage needs, it sometimes still makes sense to keep your data on-prem and it sometimes makes sense to shift your storage entirely to the cloud. However, for many organizations, there is a middle ground alternative where hybrid cloud storage is the most practical option, according to Caringo and Wasabi executives.

On-prem and cloud storage can actually co-exist in a state of “friendly coopetition,” David Boland, Wasabi director of product marketing, said March 26 during Caringo’s third “Brews & Bytes” webcast, “On-Premises and Cloud Storage – Friends or Foes?”

Agreeing with Boland, Eric Dey, Caringo director of product, explained: “It depends on … the organization’s internal DevOps and what the applications are and where they produce and where they use data. So, on-prem makes a lot of sense for people who produce a lot of data and use a lot of data within their own networks. If they produce and use data up in the cloud, then… there’s a lot of economics of using it in the cloud. And then you have pretty much everyone who’s pretty much somewhere in the middle of all that. So, it’s a spectrum…. There’s absolutely room for both.”

There are, however, “cloud bigots out there that would say you should be all cloud all the time,” Boland said, pointing to those folks who want to speed up the transition entirely to the cloud. There are also those on the other side who don’t want to move anything to the cloud, he noted.

However, “in the middle is the friendly coopetition,” where there may be a requirement to store at least some data on-prem, but “there’s also a good solution in the cloud for maybe archive or a backup,” according to Boland, who noted about 14,000 customers now use Wasabi’s cloud object storage.

“We don’t really compete with … on-prem storage too much” at Wasabi, he said, adding: “There is some overlap, but for the most part we see ourselves as a fantastic [option] for back-up use case [and] archive use case,” with use cases “growing on a daily basis.”

Boland described himself as a “big fan of hybrid cloud.” However, referring to a previous Caringo webcast in which Nicholas Smith, director of media technologies at JB&A Distribution, outlined the five tiers of storage, Boland noted it’s the fifth tier – the cloud archive – “where Wasabi would fit.”

There were “barriers of entry to that in the past,” he said, explaining: “One of the big pushbacks that we’d seen early on… were the hidden costs for cloud,” including egress costs, inventory requests or transferring data from one data center to another on the existing cloud network” that all “drove up the price of cloud storage.”

There are, after all, a lot of people and organizations that don’t want to pay on a monthly basis for storage, he said. So, a solution that had been created was reserve capacity storage, where you could buy whatever storage you wanted as you went, he noted.

Boland told listeners: “When you have storage and something’s wrong with it and it’s not getting better, see somebody else about fixing it. You don’t have to live with slow recovery times. You don’t have to live with hidden fees or cloud costs you can’t predict.”

Because it was an entry in the “Brews & Bytes” webcast series, each of the speakers and host Adrian Herrera, VP of marketing at Caringo, pointed out at the start of the presentation what they were drinking while speaking remotely in their respective locations.

Herrera was drinking water in a San Diego State University mug because his alma mater’s basketball team “would have undoubtedly won March Madness this year, but unfortunately they didn’t get to play” due to the coronavirus crisis, he said.

Dey was drinking Shiner Bock beer in a Sierra Nevada glass to represent both the Southwest and the West Coast, he noted, while Boland said he was drinking black coffee.