Cloud storage can be defined as "easily scalable storage" provisioned for "grow as you go" capacity. Cloud storage is "elastic" so users can allocate what they need, and pay for what they use. Cloud storage enables unbounded data growth for cloud services, such as Internet search, photo, video, or other unstructured data storage.
Cloud storage for cloud services includes both private and public cloud infrastructures. Private cloud storage is typically on-premises IT-provisioned storage, allocated on demand, typically providing web & file serving. Public cloud storage is typically allocated by 3rd party infrastructure, platform, application, or storage "as a service" vendors for storing enterprise data, or implemented as social media sites for sharing personal data, messages, photos, or videos
How to Support Unbounded Data Growth
Scale-out (aka clustered) storage is a combination of a dedicated storage server appliance and storage devices integrated into a single platform. Capacity is scaled with additional storage platforms, and data is shared across all clustered storage platforms. The benefit of this architecture is that I/O and storage processing resources scale, along with capacity. Data can be protected using erasure coding which breaks data into fragments ("shards"), mathematically encodes them with some redundancy, and distributes the shards across clustered storage nodes in different "failure zones" for durability.
For example, a popular "10+6" erasure coding technique divides data into 10 shards with 6 redundant shards. All data can be reconstructed with less than all of the shards (any 10 of 16). This protects data with less than 100% overhead (60% in this example) vs. replication, for example.
Cloud Storage Requirements for High Data Growth
Cloud data centers deploying high growth data storage are looking for lower operating costs, for example reduced W/TB, so they can provide more cost-effective cloud storage services. They are looking for HDDs with Enterprise reliability so they can run all HDDs 7x24 and deploy hundreds of HDDs in a rack without vibration sensitivities. They are looking for high capacity spindles to optimize drive slot capacity in order to deploy high density storage and rapidly grow capacity.
Toshiba’s Advantages for Cloud Data Centers
Toshiba's 6TB* Enterprise Cloud HDDs (aka "MC Series") optimize the balance of enterprise capacity, workload, efficiency, and performance required by today's high data growth Cloud use-cases. Toshiba's 7200 RPM (vs. 5400 RPM) performance reduces latency and increases bandwidth, which enables increased service levels for cloud-based applications and storage. Toshiba's 6TB high capacity provides better power efficiency (more TBs per watt than the prior generation) which improves OpEx, while lowering the number of spindles to manage which reduces administrative costs.
Toshiba 6TB Enterprise Cloud HDDs are designed for Cloud data centers, with features such as Enterprise reliability and 7x24 operation for improved data durability, and RV sensors for high density rack storage. Toshiba's high capacity enables large scale-out expansion units for rapid storage growth providing the ability to keep up with high growth storage demands. This enables Cloud Service Providers to optimize revenue by offering competitive service levels with scalable storage capacities for their Cloud-based applications and storage services.
*Toshiba defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 230 = 1,073,741,824 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, such as Microsoft Operating System and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.