Steve Duplessie clarified his recent 'pot-stirring' post on cloud storage economics, with this new post, which was thoughtful and well written.
He brings up the history lessons of the over-hyped, over-financed bubble and demise of storage service providers (SSPs) during the early years of this decade, arguing that their failure was the inability to deliver sufficient value. I'd add that the technology available at that time was insufficient to allow the SSPs to deliver much other than expensive bulk storage. The evolution of virtualization technologies since then has made a big difference, changing the cost equations for service providers and allowing them to focus on application specialization and service delivery.
Steve argues that adding application value is the key, which I don't disagree with, but storage applications have always been tricky to define - just as storage technology is always very tricky to develop. I contend that value-add in storage comes from things that often seem very mundane, such as being bulletproof & flexible - a perspective I took in this YouTube video on 3PARTV. Just in time delivery of applications and the corresponding "right-sized", immediately available storage to support those applications makes a huge difference to service providers and their customers. Reservationless, incremental storage provisioning does not sound like much of an application, but it certainly is the way everybody wants storage delivered to their applications.
The ability to right-size storage - and the flexibility to make changes to storage at a moments notice is what drives 3PAR's technology development. It's why we have been so successful selling our products to cloud service providers. In the weeks to come, look for more service-oriented innovations from us.
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