Comments on: Cloud storage is a component

By: Pete Steege

Pete Steege — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:11:19 +0000

“Service” and “solution” are such relative terms I don’t see that they are being used incorrectly here. Better reason not to use the terms are that they are so prone to misinterpretation.

By: Chuck McManis

Chuck McManis — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 18:57:32 +0000

You don’t differentiate between “cloud storage” as a business model (storage offered over an Internet connection) and “cloud storage” as a storage architecture (storage services exported by a collection of networked computers with attached storage devices). Amazon’s S3 is a good example of the former and something like NetApp’s GX with a dozen nodes is an example of the latter.

Your three problems (availability, performance, and economics) don’t really apply to the latter (well maybe economics) the challenge of “Storage as an internet service” are that there are so many variables between you and your storage you can’t ever fix the first two issues without massively impacting the third.

That being said, making existing assets in your already clustered computers available is a win (kind of like free storage) which is what Parascale does and of course if you are delivering web services anyway then having storage in that cloud as well is also a win (disclaimer I work at Google and have an advisory role with Parascale)

I have a picture in my office that I photoshopped (part of a preso I did at FAST) which has a disk drive with 5 head assemblies mounted around the platters. The problem with disks these days is they are acting more and more like DECTape in terms of good sequential performance and poor random i/o. Yes flash is better, to some extent the blended drives have a possibility to be better still, but the use of a thousand drives on a thousand machines works even better. Takes a relatively small amount of CPU away from what ever else they are doing and adds a lot of storage capability to your cloud.

–Chuck

By: Cloud as a component « Yet Another VC Blog

Cloud as a component « Yet Another VC Blog — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 00:28:10 +0000

[...] a comment » Robin Harris just made a post about cloud storage as a service that was both insightful and right in line with some of my thinking about cloud [...]

By: Jeremy Horn

Jeremy Horn — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 19:57:56 +0000

I have been talking about the cloud as a component, Modular Innovation, for quite some time over at The Product Guy. As companies evolve into whatever the next generation of Internet products becomes they will become more modular and make use of more and other Modular Innovations, from clouds to data portability and many other online products and features. I am recommending this article to my readers…

http://tpgblog.com/2008/12/26/the-product-guys-weekend-reading-december-26-2008/

If you are interested in a good introductory discussion on Modular Innovation and the increasing modularization of online products check out my article…

http://tpgblog.com/2007/12/06/modular-innovation-101/

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy
http://tpgblog.com

By: The Product Guy’s Weekend Reading (December 26, 2008) « The Product Guy

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 16:58:05 +0000

[...] Modular Innovation… http://storagemojo.com/2008/12/22/cloud-storage-is-a-component/ Understanding clouds as key components in Modular [...]

By: Wes Felter

Wes Felter — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 04:05:12 +0000

You’re on to something here. Cloud storage: slow. Cloud storage+compute: fast.

By: S.Suresh

S.Suresh — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:09:34 +0000

Hi Robin,

I hadn’t thought this way earlier. As you say, the key is posing the correct problem. I guess people will have a total different expectation from cloud if you take it as a component and not as a service.

S.Suresh