In this blog I look beyond the obvious and try to find out why people and companies do what they do - and what it means for the rest of us. 
The clouds are just that, cloudy. Hard to figure out what anyone is talking about, or why. I’m here to help.
There are big guys like EMC using “Journey to the private cloud….” as their moniker. They can say nothing, because they are big. The problem, as I explained it to Mr. Tucci (at which point he might have wanted to hit me), is that it says nothing. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “Gee, I need to journey to the private cloud today…” Might as well be “Follow the yellow brick road.” That’s the issue. People don’t buy slogans. They buy fire hoses when they are on fire.
Until the market BELIEVES that it A: has a problem that needs to be solved and B: requires the cloud to be the answer to that problem, there will be no real business. The good news, is I believe that reality is coming, and there will be legit business opportunities here.
For the big dogs, like EMC, they (smartly) want the cloud to be private, because the private cloud is really “IT”–and they do well when IT is buying stuff. They want to arm the public cloud providers, who are essentially the IT departments of service providers, where (stunningly), EMC does well.
For the small guys, the problem is the same, but they can’t really afford to wait around for the market to figure out their relevance. Thus, as is my nature, I’ll try to help.
Nasuni, Cirtas, TwinStrata, and StorSimple I know. Gladinet and CTERA are in the space, but I’m less familiar with them. You will hear from more larger players shortly. All of these guys want to be the “gateway” to the cloud. All of them sound cool in my opinion. Not all of them will make it. What each will need to do is to tell you, very specifically, what problem they solve that you are willing to part ways with your money to do so. Until then, they will be cool, and no one will use them.
Each needs to realize that “cloud” isn’t a solution to a problem. It’s a means–or an enabler–to a solution. What each needs to focus on is the actual problem. When I read through StorSimple’s site, I see reference to Microsoft apps, like Sharepoint. They should spend time on that space and identifying that problem. There are lots of Sharepoint users, and lots of problems. Show me how your gizmo/cloud combo solves those problems.
I love the Nasuni play–they effectively give you an endless Filer. They (as do most) cache locally on premise, present a file system, and then age files out to the cloud(s) all de-duped and economical. If you think about it, it’s the perfect tiering model. Why would you ever put any more file data on your SAN (which people do) at 10X the price?
The block equivalents, like TwinStrata, do the same thing–but the interface is iSCSI. Backup seems to be a nice app for them to focus on.
So the first “problem” I see here is economics and management. The economics are easy to understand–they let you pick a cloud provider to put your stuff on (and importantly–take it off!) with a known cost basis for exactly the capacity you require–it doesn’t get any better than that. Then they take the management burden of tiering away from you, since you set it and forget it. They do the heavy lifting on optimizing what goes where, when, and how. You get optimized economics, automated tiering, and perhaps the best of all–control. You get to decide to pull data back, move it to another provider, or both. Can’t see Amazon letting you do that.
The big guys will need the little guys. They let a big guy get into the cloud provider space, without actually doing anything. They can use Amazon if they want, and no one will know. Controlling the knobs and the billing is all they should care about.
The trick is to find the applications that are causing pain, and explaining how these solutions ease that pain. If there is no pain, it won’t matter if it’s cheaper, better, or faster. The boss doesn’t care about the fact that a Sys Admin spends 87 hours a day migrating data–that’s what we pay him for! We need real pain–real problems–that require a ‘different’ solution (people will never change just because it’s right–only because they have to).
If you have a SAN or File environment and can’t afford (economics) or can’t sustain (management) it, those are problems. If you need/want to back up to a dedupe target but aren’t going to pay for Data Domain, that’s a problem with a solution.
Focus on the problem, not on the solution. A solution without a problem is like when people advertise Pampers diapers to me. I’ve had chemo, radiation, and a vasectomy. If I need diapers, it will be Depends, not Pampers.
Related posts:
- Why the Cloud will Vaporize
- Virtual Private Clouds
- The Cloud And The Government
- Head in the Cloud? Or Just up your……..?
- Financial Future = Cloudy
Tags: Cirtas, CTERA, EMC, Gladinet, Nasuni, StorSimple, TwinStrata
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Is there really any difference between the “private cloud” that’s so buzzword-compliant these days and “corporate IT”, which we’ve been talking about for years? The whole point of the “cloud” is that some service which used to be under your control is now under someone else’s control. So to say “private cloud” is to say “this thing which used to be under my control is now…still under my control”.
Agreed. It’s the next next thing, same as the last last thing. Control is the key, however.
I stumbled across this definition about a month ago; the private cloud is what you make to keep your business customers from moving their IT services to a public cloud. Thinking about it in those terms allows me to say the words “private cloud” without wincing.
Brilliant!
Equally brilliant are your comments in this blog Mr. Duplessie, kudos!
Steve – excellent post. I think this is a really fundamental issue that needs to be addressed.
I think that we all agree the lack of ‘cloud’ definition = uncertainty for the consumer, even my dad has heard of it. But clouds are ‘woolly’ and don’t subconsciously scream ‘safety’.
We just don’t get past the first 20 seconds in our thought process, to start to rationalise logically what the company actually offers and whether we are on fire and the provider has the hose.
So what I think people are doing trying an hit the consumer with slogans that counteract that uncertainly and hence using the word ‘private’ aligns well with the core brand of the provider – assuming your brand is safe!
Making sure we solve the legitimate ‘on the face of it’ challenge is one thing, convincing the consumer and giving them that warm feeling of trust is going to be a whole different challenge for the providers,especially when certain big players who are at the front of our minds publicly either get ‘hacked’ or actively misplace our trust by sharing/mining our data with their selected partners, holding us as the poor consumer to ransom.
Just from a few experiences, the areas that the private cloud message really works well is when your serving up to a community of connected individuals. Take for example the emergency services who all connect to a ‘secure private network’ the service approach works really well and offers legitimate benefits in that police force 1 can now quickly share information with police force 2 and fire service 3, you can start to centralize knowledge and information but importantly rip out some very significant costs. You would have thought a good strategy for the government especially in the UK considering they are trying to remove £7billion out of public services!
Just my thoughts.
Love the spot on diagnosis of the overall issue as well as theinsight on each Cloud players. I agree with both with a little bit extending Steve’s insights:
1 – There is alot of thrashing in this space and it is hard to to determine which Cloud to goto as everyone is doing something a little different – its hard to compare Cloud 2 Cloud. A similar diagnosis is by David Chappell:
“If I ruled the world”, says David Chappell, “I would make the phrase ‘private cloud’ illegal”. In conversation with David Gristwood, David Chappell, during his recent world tour, discusses cloud players, such as Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com, VMware, Windows Azure and more. You can see his Cloud2Cloud comparison in brief here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7NHQdh8_uo
2 – There is too much hype about the Cloud and it should not be treated as a silver bullet solution for all IT woes. I found a great video on this topic which gives a framework of questions to evaluate if you should go to the Cloud and how to assess whether to have a public cloud, a private cloud or a hybrid solution [regardless of who is providing the cloud i.e. Amazon, Windows Azure, SalesForce, ]
“Bridging the Gap from On-Premises to the Cloud” by Yousef Khalidi:
http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/SVC20
thoughts?
hope that helps,
-cn
FYI – I just found a more recent talk with David Chappell on this topic where he covers others issues such as:
- IaaS vs PaaS
- Private vs Public Cloud
- Applications that are not a great fit for the Cloud and those which are.
- The threat of Public Cloud to IT departments
Not bad for 10minutes
helps if I give the link :
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/David+Gristwood/Conversations-with-David-Chappell-about-Windows-Azure-and-Cloud-Computing/
-cn
The biggest problems in IT today are the biggest problems we has yesterday – we haven’t done a great job in fixing them. Whenever I’m out and about the item thats come up again and again over the last 15 years I’ve been in the business has been “backup” and this must be the most fruitful area of innovation, in someways the dedupe technology really helps as you’ve removed most of the cost which is actually getting the data into the cloud – needs an onramp etc and its where the Storage Service Providers (cloud Mk1) started out. Where I struggle to see the benefit of cloud is the other great use case – Archive thats being touted, how much data are you going to store on someone elses infrastructure, how much are you going to charge me to move it out to anther provider when I get fed up paying that annuity charge – I’m not convinced by the cloud economic arguement yet as the switching or end of life costs haven’t been factored in and that reminds me of another industry – nuclear power plants that suddenly lost their attraction as people wised up to the whole life costs.
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Great points, Steve.
The definition of cloud that I use is something like “large scale resources, offered (and priced) on-demand, in small chunks, with self-provisioning”. I suppose that those are capabilities that an enterprise IT shop would aspire to, so calling that a private cloud doesn’t seem completely bogus.
More importantly though, is that public cloud providers that meet this definition can offer huge cost advantages for a number of solutions. I agree with you that vendors need to articulate the specific benefits, and focus on the real problem, but for a real cloud solution, there is enough magic to justify all the attention.
I have been in the Disaster Recovery space for nearly 15 years, and I am convinced that cloud creates a real disruption point for that industry. Servers that have been woefully under-protected can now have a real shot at rapid, off-site recovery at a price and complexity point that businesses can swallow.
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Great blog. I looked at, e.g. the offering from Nasuni which appears to cost about $150 per month per TB. However, I can buy a 2TB drive at Best Buy for $90 as a one time fee. Seems a lot cheaper to me. So which cloud market place offerings allow me to just keep buying and ‘adding on’ $90 2TB drives? I know this is possible with do-it-yourself things like glusterfs, but administration seems tricky with potentially dangerous, manually started ‘re-balancing’ necessary when drives are added or taken down. Which private cloud NAS solutions simply allow for adding extra drives, with automatic re-balancing, automatic data redundancy, automatic data de-duplication, automatic corruption detection, and present the cluster of drives as one big monster NAS drive?