Wikibon Repost: Is Virident Poised for Cloud?

Turning IT Costs into Profits: New Storage Requirements Emerge for NextGen Cloud Apps

Last Update: Dec 14, 2011 | 06:39

Originating Author: David Vellante

One of the more compelling trends occurring in the cloud is the emergence of new workloads. Specifically, many early cloud customers focused on moving data to the cloud (e.g. archive or backup) whereas in the next twelve months we’re increasingly going to see an emphasis on moving applications to the cloud; and many will be business/mission critical (e.g. SAP, Oracle).

These emergent workloads will naturally have different storage requirements and characteristics. For example, think about applications like Dropbox. The main storage characteristic is cheap and deep. Even Facebook, which has much more complex storage needs and heavily leverages flash (e.g. from Fusion-io), is a single application serving many tenants. In the case of Facebook (or say Salesforce), it has control over the app, end-to-end visibility and can tune the behavior of the application to a great degree.

In 2012, cloud service providers will begin to deploy multitenant/multi-app environments enabled by a new type of infrastructure. The platform will not only provide block-based storage but it will deliver guaranteed quality of service (QoS) that can be pinned to applications. Moreover, the concept of performance virtualization – where a pool of performance (not capacity) is shared across applications by multiple tenants – will begin to see uptake. The underpinning of this architecture will be all-flash arrays.

This means that users can expect a broader set of workloads types to be run in the cloud. The trend is particularly interesting for smaller and mid-sized customers that want to run Oracle, SAP and other mission critical apps in the cloud as a way to increase flexibility, reduce CAPEX and share risk, particularly security risk.

The question is who will deliver these platforms? Will it be traditional SAN suppliers such as EMC, IBM, HP, HDS and NetApp or emerging specialists like SolidFire, Nimbus and Virident? The bet is that while the existing SAN whales will get their fair share of business, especially in the private cloud space, in the growing cloud service provider market, a new breed of infrastructure player will emerge with the vision, management, QoS and performance ethos to capture marketshare and grow with the hottest CSP players.

For data center buyers, where IT is a cost center, the safe bet may be traditional SAN vendors. For cloud service providers, where IT is a profit center, the ability to monetize services levels by providing QoS and performance guarantees on an application by application basis will emerge as a differentiator.

Action Item: All-flash arrays will emerge as an enabler for new applications in the cloud. The key ingredients will be not just the flash capability, but more importantly management functions that enable controlling performance at the application level. Those shops that view IT as a profit center (e.g. cloud service providers) should aggressively pursue this capability and begin to develop new value-based pricing models tied to mission critical applications.

You missed this note about the new high-density Fusion-io Octal

Buried in SSD News — there’s this:

So what can you do with an Octal powered server that you couldn’t do before?

One trivial example is that if you add some dedupe, compression and an iSCSIstack you can easily create a 1U storage appliance with maybe 100TB to 200TB of fast virtual storage which (because of the low latency) will run rings around similar bulk storage SSDs which use 2.5″ SSDs in RAID.

Here’s the direct link:  SSD NEWS

(you’ll have to scroll about 1/3rd the way down the page)

DealBase CEO Sam Shank Quoted in NYT Today

ok — instant cred for me?  It’s like I learned a new word and now I hear it everywhere.  Yesterday I posted about DealBase — something I had never heard about prior.  I learned about DealBase while researching Addict-o-matic — turns out they have some staff in common.  Anyway — badda boom badda bing — DealBase’s CEO gets a some real estate in today’s NYT business section.  In an article about hotel customer loyalty:

“It’s about offering added value rather than lowering rates,” said Sam Shank, chief executive of DealBase.com, an online search engine for hotels. “When travel fell after 9/11, hotels dropped their rates and it took a while for them to bring those prices up again. They don’t want to go through that again.”

Addict-o-matic: Inhale the Web

It was bound to happen — not only is Addict-0-matic, well, addicting — but it really works.  You really can instantly create a webpage with the latest buzz on any topic.  The widgets out of the box support just about any web content repository you can think of.  I haven’t noodled around too much with it but I am guessing you can add / drop / move the various screen components.  I am going to try to add topsy…

Anyway — in case you hadn’t heard:  ADDICT-O-MATIC

Cicular Motion at LinkedIn, Facebook, & twitter

When I publish here, all of my other online nets get the update — this includes Facebook, twitter, & LinkedIn.
Yesterday, I engaged the LinkedIn / twitter update feature. So now, when I post here, twitter automatically puts the update at the bottom of the left hand skyscraper on my Profile page.

Additionally, if I choose to add the tag: “LinkedIn” to a post here, this too automatically finds its way to LinkedIn on the bottom right hand skyscraper.  So every post here that is tagged LinkedIn will be shown twice on my LinkedIn page — one on the lower left (just the title and URL)   and one on the right (first couple of sentences) as well as once on my Facebook page and once as a tweet.

Got all that?