Service Provider Insider

My Discussions With A Cloud Builder

About a week ago, I had an interesting interaction with Randy Bias.  Randy (@randybias) has a great gig: he's CEO of a consulting firm (www.cloudscaling.com) that builds scale-out clouds much in the manner of AWS.

I found the discussion interesting because Randy's architectural philosophies are in contrast to the ones that VMware, Cisco and EMC are using to build private clouds with technologies such as a Vblock.

And anytime I meet someone who's enjoying success using a different belief system, I am very curious indeed.  Not only do I want to understand their value proposition, but I also want to see if pieces and parts of the EMC value proposition could play a role as well.

When Cheap And Cheerful Is What You Really Want

I admit it, I do have a point of view in regards to service provider business models -- and the associated infrastructure requirements. 

For example, I think it's more about scale-up than scale-out, and I think a lot of successful models will target enterprise IT-class workloads that demand a low initial cost-to-serve and the potential to easily upsell to more demanding capabilities from the same infrastructure.

But, as they say, the customer is always right.  And when it comes to service providers, it's hard to argue with a successful business model.

In this respect, cheap and cheerful is what some SPs really want.  And, surprisingly, EMC does that well.