Cloud Storage and Storage Virtualization- An industry perspective
While the term cloud and cloud storage is a commonly used term these days, there is a lot more to it than we think, with cloud playing an important role in the IT industry it is important that we have our concepts clear. On August 26th 2016, a guest lecture on Storage and Storage Virtualization was organized for the 1st Year MBA students. Mr. Piyush Gupta, Senior Development Manager-Storage Development SVC/Storwize was the speaker for the day.
He started with the importance of each one of us continuously keeping ourselves updated and advised us to choose a technology or area of interest, read up on it, set up goals and work on it until we achieve it. He stressed on the fact that it is not sufficient to have surface level knowledge about everything but we need to have in-depth knowledge about a particular field as well.
He proceeded by giving us a brief picture about the current IT Trends and the future of IT. This included Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, Mobile Computing, the Internet of Things and Machine Learning and how they are going to shape the future of IT. He said that getting data is not a problem these days, what is important is how one gets information from this data and he explained how data analytics has helped telecom companies to improve their services over time. He also explained what machine learning does and how this helps machines to easily do a lot of things that humans do. This led to a very interactive question answer session as students raised doubts on the reliability of letting machines do critical work and its possible effect on employment for people.
In the next part of the session, he explained the Cloud concept and said that cloud is a pooling of applications in one place so that multiple people can use it at one point of time. The various factors that cloud computing helps to resolve like availability, utilization, cost-effectiveness and quality service. He said that the technologies important for successful implementation of cloud are network and server virtualization, high-speed internet and interfaces. He stressed on the scalability factor of cloud computing and how realtime scaling helps to respond to planned and unplanned spikes while supporting security and compliance.
Further, he explained the three types of cloud i.e. Public, Private and Hybrid cloud, the differences between them and where they are used. He discussed the latest trends in storage like hyper convergence, high speed low latency interconnects, flash storage etc. With this, the session came to an end, however, it was a very interactive and useful session where the students were given a chance to clear doubts and voice out their opinions. This was a great learning opportunity for us and we look forward to more such lectures.
