Service Provider Insider

Commodity Clouds Vs. Differentiated Clouds

Randy Bias (@randybias, CEO of Cloudscaling) tweeted earlier today that -- compared to things like a Vblock -- the clouds that he was capable of building were about 1/10th the cost.

Now, that's an interesting discussion, to be sure. 

And I'm not here to berate Randy -- or anyone else -- who agrees with this line of thinking.  Randy appears to be a smart guy, and very experienced as well.

It's not a new thought -- the broader industry debate around commodity vs. differentiated has been around for a very long time indeed, and isn't going away anytime soon.  It's moved from hardware, to software and now to the cloud.

But how does this historic debate play here?  And especially in the context of service providers who are looking at this more as a business proposition, as opposed to an intellectual debate?

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.

Reconsidering Storage As A Service

Yes, this is a blog about service providers, and -- yes -- I work for EMC, so it's inevitable that sooner or later we'd get around to this topic in one form or another.

But it's not going to be the usual shameless product plug, although I'll be happy to indulge you if that's what you're looking for.

No, this post offers up some thoughts about newer approaches that I see evolving for delivering storage-as-a-service as an underpinning for a variety of SP business models.

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.

Why Service Providers Like Vblocks

OK, the VCE coalition started shipping real-deal Vblocks at the beginning of this year.  The Vblock keeps getting better and better -- new features, new configs, etc.  It's moving fast.

As we sit here in May, I've noticed two things:

1 -- there's a lot of demand for Vblocks, and
2 -- service providers are demanding more than their fair share

I've been thinking about why this is, and have some observations I'd like to bounce off you.

The Secret Of Standardization

Just about everyone in IT will give the concept of "standardization" lip service, but for service providers, it's part of what sets them apart from ordinary enterprise IT, traditional outsourcers, system integrators, et. al.

Despite everyone's intellectual acknowledgement that standardization is generally a good thing, it turns out to be a hard thing to excel at -- simply because there are so many pragmatic forces at work to create the IT equivalent of entropy in large settings.

However, if you're an SP, a well-thought-out philosophy towards standardization is a key part of any successful business model.  Otherwise, you're just another data center with a chaotic pile of gizmos.

From Scale Out To Scale Up

I'm now starting to meet more and more classical hosting providers who want to evolve their business model.  They've done pretty well in providing dedicated resources in efficient data centers at an attractive price.

Now, they want to move from a fixed-resource, fixed-price model to a more lucrative variable-resource, variable-price model -- presumably, where the variability is in an economically positive direction!

And many of them are starting to realize that the scale-out architectures that worked so well in their last model probably won't work out so well in their next model ...