Cloud storage is a common target for backups and archives, but it’s a tricky proposition for primary data.

It is recommended for IT shops to use hybrid cloud storage or cloud-integrated storage for primary data when applications run at their on-premises data centers. With hybrid cloud storage, often in the form of an appliance, a copy of the most active data is stored on-premises and the less active data is tiered to the cloud. Cloud-integrated storage refers to a cloud gateway product, SAN, network-attached storage (NAS) or a unified storage system that tiers and/or caches data to cloud storage.

Also, for storing primary data in the cloud is running the application with the cloud provider’s compute service to improve performance.

It is understood that service-level agreements (SLAs) is the hottest trend in cloud storage for primary data.

Types of primary data for which Cloud Storage is appropriate:

Talking about primary data in the cloud, it comes down to this concept of latency between the application and its data. That means the storage and the application need to be relatively closely located. So, if the application’s in the cloud and the storage is in the cloud with it, that type of storage can be almost any kind of storage. That can be SAN or NAS or both. It can even be object, because the latency issue is less, however, it varies by different kinds of storage systems.

The kind of primary data that you can use with primary storage in the cloud depends on the SLAs. When a primary application or a mission-critical application is placed in cloud, the users typically want a certain performance level that’s measurable. Usually it’s no more than what they’re paying when it’s not met. What the SLA does is, help enforce that, and the service provider typically today has certain capabilities, either in software or in hardware. And there are storage systems that will do this, and this is software for storage systems that will do this that can guarantee the SLAs to a point, depending on the resources available. So, the kind of primary data that you want to have in the cloud is the kind in which you can get the results you’re looking for if it weren’t in the cloud.

The technology trends for cloud-integrated storage for primary data:

The currently fast selling – is SLA capabilities. SLAs are typically tied to performance, response time, latency, and that is probably the hottest thing going on right now in the service provider for data in the cloud or primary data in the cloud.

Some storage systems can do it in solid-state, and others it with a hybrid. Others do it with software where they’re basically robbing Jack to pay Joe so that when there’s an SLA issue, when it’s falling below the requirement of the application or the user, it will take resources from elsewhere and make sure that that application gets the SLAs it’s looking for.