What is the difference between public cloud storage and private cloud storage?

Since the beginning of 2018, government agencies have frequently launched public goods and CDN bidding, and major cloud service providers have also made efforts at the same time. In the first half of the year, the public cloud market competition can be described as a hundred flowers, Alibaba Cloud, Nets and other leaders continue to lead, Huawei Cloud came to the fore, and more cloud vendors in other vertical areas also achieved good results. The cloud market finally ushered in a blowout.

What is cloud storage?

Cloud storage is a new concept extended and developed in the concept of cloud computing. It is an emerging network storage technology, which refers to a large number of different networks in the network through cluster applications, network technologies or distributed file systems. A type of storage device works together by application software to jointly provide a system for data storage and service access functions.

Cloud storage can help users put master data or backup data into an indeterminate storage pool outside the enterprise or business unit. With cloud storage services, organizations can save on investment costs, simplify complex setup and management tasks, and put data in the cloud to easily access data from more places.

What is the difference between public cloud storage and private cloud storage?

According to different cloud deployment methods, cloud storage is mainly divided into three categories: public cloud storage, private cloud storage, and hybrid cloud storage.

Public cloud storage

Like Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) and the storage services provided by Nutanix, they offer a large amount of file storage at a low cost. Suppliers can keep each customer's storage and applications independent and private. Among them, the personal cloud storage service represented by Dropbox is a prominent representative of the development of public cloud storage, and the domestic is represented by various cloud disk products.

2. Private cloud storage

The private storage cloud only provides corresponding storage services and corresponding quality of service (QoS) for restricted users. Users who use storage services do not need to know the specific details of the "cloud" composition. As long as they know the corresponding interface and provide the corresponding strategy, the rest of the work is done by the "cloud". Users only need to regard this storage cloud as a black box resource pool. How to implement it internally, how to configure it, what technology to use, and what platform to use, users do not need to care. As long as the user needs it, this "cloud" provides storage space, and the data can be accessed at any time, just like accessing local storage. As a cloud, it provides a lot of additional functions without affecting users, making the cloud an efficient, reliable, and secure storage pool.

How to build cloud storage?

When it comes to cloud architecture, some vendors emphasize the need for scalability and flexibility. It is convinced that a relatively low-cost cloud architecture model will be more attractive. But almost all vendors will claim that they have such attributes, so these definitions are less useful. In addition, cloud deployment does not only refer to the architecture on the hardware, because the cloud will develop to the end, the meaning of the process will be greater than the product itself.

How the enterprise can get the return from the cloud architecture depends on the standards and characteristics of the cloud architecture itself. This includes good controllability, optimized usage, streamlined infrastructure, and enterprise-level management practices.

A core feature of private cloud storage is having a standard architecture, sometimes referred to as a reference architecture. Some people may disagree with this view. Since it is a standardized architecture, there should be a standardized process. In this sense, it makes sense. However, whether it is backup recovery, space pre-allocation, or monitoring or other storage management-related operational processes, standardized processes can be employed on different platforms.

Although the reference architecture can be a vendor, the situation is often composed of multiple vendors. The reference architecture actually refers to the specifications of the different systems and configurations that the enterprise can support. This will include the version number of the software and firmware to determine the consistency of the product used by the enterprise. For most organizations, storage consolidation tends to play an important role in moving closer to the reference architecture. Because of business mergers, business unit independence, or simply environmental issues, companies often have to give up on cost and technical considerations to choose a range of different systems and platforms.