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The Challenges of Cloud Service Providers-Part Three - Recap

Tuesday, October 18, 2011 posted by Dave Wright

recap video

To wrap up our VMworld video series hosted by Silicon Angle TV, I sat down with Virtustream's Matt Theurer and Softlayer's Duke Skarda to discuss as a group, some of the challenges faced by cloud service providers. This conversation focuses largely around the barriers that these two companies face with traditional storage systems in the cloud, and the opportunities that flash storage presents.

For both companies, the use of all-SSD based technologies is changing the way they think about storage, and how they approach resolving the gap between server and storage performance.  Matt discusses how SSD technology has inverted the capacity / performance imbalance that has existed for many years and how capacity will soon be the limiting factor within cloud storage architectures; a much easier metric to manage.  Duke explaines how block storage is a fundamental building block of cloud infrastructure, and traditionally the most problematic part to deal with.

I also got a bit of airtime to talk about the history of SolidFire and how my experience at Rackspace, and evaluating how traditional storage is used within the cloud, both helped me shape the technology of SolidFire and the market focus of the company.  It is important to keep in mind that SSDs do not constitute a different approach to storage.  SSDs are just part of the system.  How that system is architected, the functionality designed around the SSDs, and deep knowledge of your customer and their key feature-set, are all required when delivering a next generation storage solution. 

Many thanks to Matt and Duke for sharing their views on performance storage in the cloud, and to Silicon Angle TV for hosting us!

-Dave Wright, Founder & CEO 

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