The Shift in the Cloud Discussion
This time each year, the hosting industry gathers in Las Vegas for 48 hours of events at Tier1's Hosting Transformation Summit. It’s been interesting to watch this event evolve over the past 4 years. The first events were small with a variety of hosters/like minds meeting and included a few panel discussions. This year however, the event attracted over 800 attendees and included a very robust set of panels, keynotes and exhibitors.
Last year it was clear the focus of the event had completely switched to cloud. It’s interesting this year to see that the discussions both at the event and in the hallways seemed to shift and soften a little to talk more about cloud in the hybrid form vs. the pure form of last year.
There were some excellent presentations, most notably Joe Weinman from HP and of Cloudonomics fame, posing some interesting questions on the economics of cloud and the usecases where it makes most sense. This is the kind of cloud adoption we see most of -- where a customer in a data center uses cloud for selective workloads vs. moving everything. The organizations who are moving everything tend to have new business models or evolving business models where they are in some form of rapid development. Once these organizations reach scale, revenue or launch, the hybrid model really comes into play.
I had a lengthy discussion with one cloud middleware vendor pushing the hybrid on-prem/off-prem cloud; this is the hybrid model the industry has the most interest in. It’s the poster child for hybrid but also the model we see least. It’s always fun to push back a little on vendors and see what the real data is. Check out a case study on our partnership with Urban Airship for a case in point.
The other big trend at this year’s event was SSD/Flash vendors now having pure play or accelerated products at launch or nearing launch. I spoke to several - some focused on multi-tenant cloud workloads, others more focused on integrated solutions around applications such as Hadoop. 50-100k IOPS per 1u device seems to be the kind of territory many vendors are in right now -- pretty impressive technology starting to mature here. I wonder if this will be the next M&A feeding frenzy in storage.
Our next industry event will be the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando (October 16-20, 2011). It should be a good event judging by the attendees. Please feel free to swing by and see us at booth #1121 (Pacific Hall), or if you have an infrastructure question and want to whiteboard with us, please register at carpathia.com/whiteboard.
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