Hybrid multicloud storage: Pros, cons and key workloads

What is hybrid multicloud storage?

Hybrid multicloud storage brings together two things. Core to it is the concept of hybrid cloud storage, where organisations store their data across on-premise and public cloud locations. To this, multicloud means the cloud elements involves more than one public cloud.

In some ways, it’s just terminology catching up with what has happened in the real world. Enterprises haven’t really made binary choices between hybrid cloud and multicloud storage.

Instead, what has come to pass is that organisations have ended up with mixed supplier offerings dependent on workload, budget and regulatory requirements.

What are the benefits of hybrid multicloud storage?

A hybrid multicloud setup allows organisations to pick the most appropriate place for their data. This can be based on cost, capacity and scalability, resilience and data protection, performance and physical location.

Hybrid multicloud storage gives IT more control over storage and avoids being locked in to a single vendor. And, at least on paper, organisations can move their data between clouds or local systems as their needs develop.

Of course, a lot of organisations already use hybrid multicloud, in that they have data on local and private cloud infrastructure, public cloud and SaaS. A simple example is where a business copies local application data and SaaS data to a public cloud backup or archiving service, or exports it to another cloud storage location for data analytics.

And there are plenty of other combinations, especially where firms want to make use of the cloud’s economies of scale, but have some datasets that – for compliance or performance reasons, for example – still need to be on-premise.

A further benefit is compliance. In some industries, including finance and healthcare, organisations might need to use multiple clouds. So, if they also need on-premise storage, they will be in a hybrid multicloud environment.

“There are certain cases where compliance means having data on two hyperscalers,” says Terry Storrar, UK managing director at Netherlands-based web hosting company Leaseweb.

What are the pitfalls of hybrid multicloud storage?

The main downside of hybrid multicloud storage is its potential complexity. CIOs need to set the advantages of choosing the best cloud or local storage for each workload or application against the complexity of manging multiple platforms. And they need to maintain data integrity and application compatibilit across all the environments.

This can stretch even the most skilled IT teams. A highly optimised storage strategy can easily stretch to a dozen or more providers, but it can quickly become hard to manage.

“You can’t manage that. It’s just not practical,” warns Storrar. “Simplicity is the key with any of these, with any of these strategies.”

The degree to which a firm’s suppliers support hybrid multicloud will also determine whether it is a practical strategy.

Key storage vendors, such as NetApp, Nutanix, Pure Storage, HPE and Dell EMC and the hyperscale cloud companies support hybrid cloud strategies. But support for hybrid multicloud is more limited.

It is fairly easy to use multiple cloud storage targets for simple backup and archiving tasks and several vendors actively support this. But for more complex workloads, it becomes harder. A system such as AWS Outpost, for example, supports private cloud using AWS technology, which integrates with AWS compute and storage, but not the GCP or Azure equivalents.

And even where hybrid multicloud is possible, CIOs need to make sure data is consistent across all platforms. This is not easy, and the effort might outweigh the benefits of the hybrid multicloud approach.

Which workloads can most benefit from hybrid multicloud storage?

The most common applications for hybrid multicloud storage are archiving and backup and recovery.

There is already a well-trodden path to hybrid cloud for these use cases, with firms keeping primary data in-house and copies in the cloud. Adding multicloud just adds redundancy and flexibility to the mix.

Business continuity is another reason for hybrid multicloud, especially where firms need highly redundant data stores in a complex application landscape. Storing data across multiple cloud vendors addresses conventional risks, such as power outages or hardware failures, but also commercial risks that could take a cloud provider offline.

Very dynamic workloads could benefit from hybrid multicloud because of the added ability to scale. Organisation increasingly want to move data to the cloud from their datacentre and back again, according to Fred Lherault, field CTO for emerging markets at Pure Storage. 

Analytics is also a well-suited use, not least because firms will already be combining data from multiple applications, including cloud-based applications and streaming data.

Technical solutions for hybrid multicloud storage

The development of containerised applications and object storage should make hybrid multicloud more practical.

Kubernetes is designed to work in distributed environments, including hybrid cloud and most enterprise users will already operate across multiple clusters. So, hybrid multicloud is a natural fit.

Object storage, with its global namespace capabilities, is well-suited to movement of unstructured data between multiple storage systems, regardless of location. This does, however, need applications that support object storage.

In the near term, organisations that want to venture into hybrid multicloud will want to look at control plane technology to manage multiple storage instances. A number of vendors, including HPE, Hitachi Vantara, NetApp, Nutanix and Pure Storage offer hybrid multicloud management features.

Accenture offers its Continuum Control Plane, and AWS and Azure are also moving towards control planes with hybrid and multicloud support. GCP has multicloud and on-premise support via Anthos. Oracle supports multicloud and on-premises infrastructure via its Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform, while IBM provides Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management. In virtualised environments, VMWare supports multiple public clouds.

These are not, however, storage-only management tools. The control plane services aim to ease all aspects of multicloud management. As a result, picking the right control plane technology cloud matter as much as the infrastructure it controls.