What are the Benefits of Cloud File Storage?
In recent years, file systems have become more cloud-friendly, offering better integration with cloud technologies such as object storage. This brings several advantages:
- Better scalability. Policy-driven tiering mechanisms allow cold data to be moved to S3-compatible storage, saving precious resources in the high-performance tier.
- Best combination of speed and $/GB. File storage gateways specifically designed to work with an object storage back-end provide a good balance of performance and cost.
- Simplified data migrations and synchronization. Many file storage systems can replicate data to remote files or object stores in the cloud or on-premises. This makes it possible to synchronize and serve data sets across different infrastructures to optimize compute-data proximity and reduce latency.
- Disaster Recovery (DR). Syncing data to a remote object store enables users to leverage a cheaper storage repository in the cloud and populate a file system only if necessary.
These capabilities are particularly important now that vendors are optimizing their file storage for flash memory and access speed, enabling users to build a multi-tier infrastructure to optimize $/GB across on-premise and cloud-based systems.