In a recent survey conducted by Corenet, corporate real estate managers in the northeast corridor reported that Hurricane Sandy had affected a variety of functions, including the operation of mission-critical facilities, data storage, back up energy sources and access to transportation infrastructure.

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In addition, reliable storage in the cloud is more expensive than local direct attached storage (DAS) or network attached storage (NAS) even when the costs of operation are considered.

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There is still a lot to be done in removing operational cost inside the data center: Now-separate elements like compute, storage and networking are increasingly intertwined, and may eventually be subsumed into a single basic operation where few programmers go.

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