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ShareThe Exponential Growth of the Cloud
Posted by George Crump on July 15, 2009
The attention that cloud storage and cloud computing gets confuses many in our industry, after all we have been here before, storage as a service, utility storage, software as a service etc... What many lose as they try to turn down the hype is that cloud computing and cloud storage unleash innovation in the developer community. Unlike many I don't think that we will see a downturn or consolidation in cloud related services for years and in fact I expect that the cloud will expand exponentially over that timeframe.
Broadly there are two types of companies involved in cloud computing and cloud storage; there are the providers of the customer facing service and there are the providers of the infrastructure that these services run on. In the early days of cloud related service many companies provide both the infrastructure and a service.
When there is a shakeout in the cloud market it will be on the infrastructure side of the equation, something I will cover in my next entry. What I call the provider side is the side of the cloud that you use and interact with, it is the customer facing interface and it is the provider side where we will experience the exponential growth of the cloud.
Clearly there will be turnover in the provider side, they will come and go, but when one company disappears five more will take its place. What the cloud brings to this type of company is the ability to leverage an infrastructure. They can in essence provide what used to be a hardware and software solution to potential customers and not have to actually provide the most expensive part; the hardware, they can leverage a cloud infrastructure provider for that.
This part of the cloud will be brimming with storage solutions ranging from collaboration to backup to archive and yes, eventually to secondary and primary storage. Because of the Cloud the cost of entry is lower than ever. All you need is a smart developer that can identify and address a market need and have them go to work. By comparison to deliver a turnkey solution today requires an additional hardware investment both upfront and ongoing, to a large extent the cloud removes this.
Comment by Mike Young on July 15, 2009 4:39 PM
It could make sense to leverage some this early, existing infrastructure. But what if that infrastructure is highly proprietary in nature? And let's not ignore the news worthy outages that Amazon has experienced with both its S3 and its EC2 services? Isn't this the type of stuff we're trying to get away from?
Hopefully we have learned from the 90's and early 2000's SSP fiasco. Sadly, I'm under the impression the new crop of SaaS guys addressing this market are hedging their bets that their services are too impractical to fully leverage by the customer. That's a dangerous proposition if I'm right. But I guess we'll see what happens.
Mike Young
CEO, Cachengo
http://cachengo.com
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Comment by George Crump on July 15, 2009 4:47 PM
Mike, Good points. Of course the do it your self model is also scary. One online storage company that I spoke with thought that redundancy was manually copying data once a night to another server. I'd like to see companies focus on what they do best and leverage the rest. If they want to keep the storage assets in house, fine but buy a real storage system designed for the multi-tenant, scalable type of use case. More in my next entry....
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Comment by Shaun Walsh, Emulex on July 15, 2009 6:18 PM
The promise of cloud computing is that it can be one of those universal computing goals where the technologies serve us, not the other way around. With each of these rounds of hype and development, we get closer to the goals of making life and our businesses better and more efficient. In your post, you mention that there will be both customer-facing providers and hidden infrastructure providers. I agree with your basic premise, but like MP3 players were in the age before iTunes, without the right software, user interfaces and business models, we won???t have a real business.
So for me, the real question is who will provide the right users interface for the cloud? Google maybe, but they seem very consumer focused. Microsoft can???t really embrace being open enough. Server vendors are a better candidate, but I am betting on a company like VMware, which provides hypervisors or other middleware products. They can provide integration without having to fight political wars amongst the big vendors. This vendor I am describing probably does not exist yet, but they will, that is what makes the technology business great, through the introduction of new thoughts, entrepreneurship and people dreaming big.
Maybe the cloud will wake up the boys on Sand Hill Road and we can get back to changing the world again. All I know from the Emulex perspective is that the cloud will require a converged, universal network to flourish and we are one of the players working hard to make that part of the cloud a reality.
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Comment by Mike Young on July 16, 2009 12:31 AM
I completely agree with you. DIY is very scary. I've seen "storage" companies take the DIY approach and they've had no background in storage. It's a very scary thing. But big iron is not the answer either. The best is seeing solutions geared towards "SMB's" but starting off at $30K. Even during my stint as CTO of Snap we wouldn't have afforded such an investment. Weren't we an SMB?
I am highly encouraged by some of the innovation that's coming out of Cloud Mania. Some of it's a bit far fetched. But there are plenty of good things too.
Mike Young
CEO, Cachengo
http://cachengo.com
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