The ZCloud Platform Usage scenarios are intended to illustrate the most typical
cloud storage use cases and are not meant to be an exhaustive list of realizations within a cloud storage environment.
A significant trend in many enterprises is to convert a large amount of existing paper records to their digitized counterparts. For such enterprises, ZCloud Platform provides an inexpensive, reliable, and high performance solution with excellent ROI. Furthermore, owing to the fact that the platform offers the core API/functions of the two market leading cloud storage services, it's easy to implement digital record management software - either use existing ones written for the duo, or implement your custom solutions quickly using their simple, well-documented, and firmly established APIs - all are supported fully by ZCloud Platform.
In late April, 2011, the currently dominant cloud computing service provider, Amazon Web Services (AWS), experienced a storage outage that lasted for more than a week. During this period, numerous Web based businesses suffered down time as well.
With the ZCloud Platform, a Web based business can easily setup a hybrid cloud (i.e. a combination of internal (aka private) storage cloud and one or more public storage clouds), such that the outage on either side wouldn't cause a complete and prolong service downtime.
Furthermore, given the fact that the Platform offers the core API/functions of AWS EBS/S3 and Google Storage, which are used by majority of Web-based businesses, compatibility among all clouds are excellent. There is no need to re-write applications - an expensive proposition in all cases. Infrastructure resilience can be improved dramatically, quickly, and at a very low cost too.
Given the accelerating adoption pace of cloud computing, sooner or later the existing customers of an ISP would ask the provider about cloud storage services.
The ISP in question obviously has three approaches:
The first approach requires the ISP's customers to learn something new. The 2nd and 3rd approach leverage existing de-factor standards. ZCloud Platform lets the ISP accomplish either one quickly and in-expensively. Its customers get choices, the ISP gets revenue. Everyone wins.
Majority of today's enterprises store their business in NAS, SAN, and tape. In the former two, typically data reside in a file system (POSIX or NTFS are the two most common ones).
If an enterprise wishes to provide Web access to such data, ZCloud Platform provides a transparent channel to data residing in a regular file system. The robust REST APIs offered by ZCloud Platform are identical to these well-known and extensively documented APIs from AWS S3 and Google Storage. It's much easier to find existing applications or write custom applications for such APIs. Both the enterprise and the users of its data have the best of the two worlds.
At present, many hospitals use medical imagine systems to record all surgical operations. With the prevalent resolution, a typical 40 minutes of surgery tends to generate over a terabytes (TB) of data. Given the fact that image resolution is ever increasing and the adoption of medical imaging procedures becomes more prevalent, the storage needs of many medical facilities are anticipated to grow even faster. Nevertheless, the size of generated images and their already compressed format make transferring actively used images for off-site storage a tedious, expensive, and impractical proposition. ZCloud Platform enables such facilities to grow their storage facilities as the need grows, instead of allocate large amount of CAPEX upfront. Again, the simple, well-understood API/functions that it offers make using/writing image management applications much easier than existing approaches.
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