When it comes to disaster recovery planning, storage capacity is an important consideration. Enterprises must determine if they need to augment their tradition storage technology or migrate to cloud-based storage. And, if cloud-base storage is the way to go, should it be public or private cloud-based storage? The challenges to making cloud storage a reality are nontrivial. IT staffs must decide which type of data and applications are best suited for the cloud. Certain processes and applications that are less latency sensitive are better suited for cloud storage, more so than mission-critical trading applications. But, enterprises can also find some “middle ground” – applications that are somewhat latency sensitive and fairly frequently accessed/modified data that are appropriate to move to the cloud.

Cloud-based storage service offering must be: – Affordable -Reliable -Scalable -Able to support massive volumes of data -Able to support geographically dispersed user base. With cloud storage, there are some challenges including how to minimize the effects of latency, restricted bandwidth and congestion on the WAN Internet access link. Ideally, a cloud storage service provider should run a virtualized software solution on their hypervisor of choice to minimize the effects of latency, bandwidth limitation and congestion. While a number of hardware-based solutions could address this challenge, a software solution makes better sense because the software can be set up dynamically or on demand. The software solution is also very affordable and scalable.

WAN optimization from virtual appliance vendors such as Certeon deliver the performance benefits and the advantages that cloud storage services require. Virtual appliances such as Certeon’s aCelera can be deployed in virtualized private, public and hybrid cloud computing environments and deliver all the performance advantages of hardware-based WAN optimization solutions as well as the flexibility, scalability, manageability and costs savings associated with virtualization.

To learn more go to http://www.certeon.com/resource_center/white_papers.asp