Virtualising storage allows you to provision as required, rather than buying masses of capacity up front that you don't yet need, owing to lack of flexibility in hardware.
One of the most appealing attractions of public cloud is the pay-as-you-use model that allows a customer to only pay for resources consumed at any point in time. "The big attraction of pay-as-you-use is that it shifts the spend from up-front capital expenditure (capex) to an operating expense (opex)," explains Dennis Naidoo, Senior Systems Engineer for the Middle East and Africa at Tintri.
"This benefits companies that are capex limited and that need to use their cash more wisely to sustain their growth. Pay-as-you-use is especially beneficial to customers that cannot predict their infrastructure demands over a long term, or have sporadic periods of high demand in the year, because this model allows you to only pay when you consume the service."
Cloud service providers can deliver this model efficiently to multiple customers with their shared infrastructure model. This means that no single consumer has to bear the full cost of the infrastructure resources available.
While the public cloud is well-suited to applications that require scale and agility, on-premises storage is suited to more static workloads that don't have the same scale up and down demands. Workloads that require guaranteed performance levels for example are preferred to be run on-premises than in the public cloud.
For this reason most organisations choose to adopt a hybrid-cloud model, where they will have some workloads running in the public cloud and others on-premise. This is where pay-as-you-grow comes into its own.
Naidoo explains: "To support on-premises workloads, customers need to invest in hardware infrastructure, such as a data centre, which represents a substantial capex investment that has to cater for the next five or even seven years' anticipated growth. Cost notwithstanding, the right choice of technology can deliver the same agility, scale and automation that public cloud delivers, but in the business's own data centre. The downside is that it doesn't come with the same consumption-based models that public cloud offers, such as pay-as-you-use."
In the past, storage has traditionally had large capex costs associated with it and the only choice that a business had was the number of years over which it could sweat the asset to reduce its realised cost. Today, businesses can access modern storage systems that are designed for scale, preferring scale-out approaches rather than scale-up. This allows a consumer much greater flexibility by starting small and scaling out as their demand increases, similar to the public cloud model.
When the business owns its own infrastructure, it has to invest when it needs to scale up, and won't benefit financially when it needs to scale back down. "Even vendors that offer a pay-as-you-use consumption model for on-premises storage will eventually wrap up the buffer capacity provided to you for growth spikes, into your base cost after a short period," says Naidoo.
"Imagine being able to grow your footprint by as small an increment as a single solid-state drive," says Naidoo. "The process is as seamless as popping in the new drive and allowing the system to detect and auto-grow the storage pool to your virtualised workloads. This approach is known as the pay-as-you-grow usage model."
Things to consider when choosing between a pay-as-you-use or pay-as-you-grow model:
* Do your on-premises workloads have a predictable steady growth, or sporadic capacity or performance demands?
* What will be your total cost of ownership over a five-year period, and will it be more cost-beneficial to own your own infrastructure?
* Would you like the option to sweat your storage assets over 6/7 year period to provide a lower total cost of ownership?
* Does your business support a capex or opex based model?
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