SSD Performance in the Cloud

There’s a perception when it comes to cloud storage that mostly it should be used for secondary or tertiary storage. But the folks at StorSimple would beg to differ. The company this week officially rolled out a set of storage appliances that are integrated with StorSimple software running on cloud computing platforms from Amazon, AT&T, EMC, Iron Mountain and Microsoft.

What makes the StorSimple approach to cloud computing different is that besides the fact that its systems are optimized for Windows environments, the appliances only update blocks of data. No block of data is ever stored twice, and the system ranks blocks based on how frequently they are accessed, said StorSimple Chief Marketing Officer Ian Howells.

The end result, says Howells, is a cloud computing storage service that offers performance that is equivalent to a solid-state drive (SSD) because all the data in the system has been deduplicated and all the data needed at any given time for any given working set of data is automatically cached.

That means that cloud storage systems, said Howells, are capable of supporting primary applications, as opposed to just be relegated to secondary storage.

It may take a little time before we see similar approaches for other environments. But for Windows-centric applications, StorSimple is trying to redefine the way we think about storage in the enterprise regardless of where it might actually be physically located.