After yesterday's slight rant about the mis-use of the word 'Cloud' and everyone is using it to put in front of their product name and claiming what they sell is 'Cloud'; I thought I'd write a more reasonable piece on Cloud. Cloud Storage to be precise!
We often talk about an explosion in unstructured data and the huge amount of growth that is seen there; well, in my experience within the more traditional corporate IT functions, I don't really see it. Yes, there is growth but most of it is due to the mis-use of corporate file-servers to store personal files such as photos, music and movies. But there are only so many documents and work-related content that a single person can produce.
Obviously, in the media space; there is an explosion of unstructured data, content which would have been stored on traditional media is now moving over to digital media but most people do not work for large media companies.
But every individual in their personal lives are becoming content creators and they also consume an ever increasing amount of content. I talked very briefly about storing your life in this blog entry. It is this phenomena which will really drive the growth of storage going forward and it is this problem that needs to be solved.
Service providers are springing up to try to solve this problem and provide service to the end-user; almost every ISP tries to bundle a small amount of on-line storage for their customers. But to get a reasonable amount of online storage is still relatively expensive; to store the hundreds of gigabytes of content that some of us have at an online provider is still prohibitively expensive in general. Certainly if you want access to it in a form which is seamless to all the applications that you want to use, I couldn't for example move my iTunes library to Mozy and continue to access it via iTunes; I still need to keep my on-site copy.
If you think hundreds of gigabytes is an exageration; just look at the growth in personal HD-recorders such as the Flip and almost every camera. People are just going to upload the content and store it most of the time, it won't take them long to be heading towards a 100 gigabytes.
This storage needs to be cheap and online; I am for the moment ignoring the bandwidth issues that many of us face today; this storage is going to have compete with the cost of DAS today and I am talking about consumer DAS; not enterprise drives.
This is the real problem that what I think of as Cloud Storage needs to solve, not the traditional corporate IT storage issues. Not the IaaS issues which are actually relatively easy to fix; all that needs is cheaper than the current Enterprise storage with an easy to use front-end. That is not a hard problem to fix and that is what annoys me most about some of the announcement and pronouncements that have been made about Cloud recently.
Let's start thinking about how we solve those things which are hard, not sitting in our little comfort-zone supplying the same old storage with go faster stripes. Because if the traditional vendors don't; there are plenty of non-traditional vendors who are not tied by legacy thinking who will.
Some of you have already made a start, some of you are pretending. This is a different game to the one you were playing in. The old game is still there but there's a new one to play as well. And what is Consumer today may become Enterprise tomorrow; this is not just a case of trickle-down, there will be significant cross-fertilisation.
There is a big prize to be won but I'm not sure it is the prize that most of you are playing for.
Good points Martin. Seems as if there is a market for Cloud Storage with a cheap price point for infrequently accessed data – that’s maybe stored on tape to make the business model work for the provider.
Mark, unfortuntately I think you miss the point. This data may not be infrequently accessed, the access patterns will be odd and random.
The accesses will come from multiple devices, I might be accessing my files from a mobile device or maybe from my home pc or perhaps via a STB.
There are many trends coming together; from the impact of non-linear access to broadcast content to the impact of photo-sharing sites to the impact of social media to the impact of download stores. All of these factors are beginning to point to the need for a personal centralised information store.
Call it a personal cloud if you want but the dramatic increase in digital content being created by the individual will probably dwarf the content being created by the media.
And as people begin to realise the fragility of keeping all this content on their local machines, the more the market will grow. But it will be a hugely price sensitive market and the premium over the cost of DAS cannot be huge.
EMC have been extremely cute in both the Mozy acquisition and the Iomega acquisition. This both gives them a foothold in the market but also the chance to understand the realities of running services at scale. They are not merely reliant on guesswork and what their customers are telling them; they are their own customers. This could be very powerful for them.
Hey Bod –
I can’t say that I totally get what the storage cloud is (and that is as honest an admittion that an “HP Storage Guy” can make), but based on what I do understand, I think you’re right on. As we have been thinking about cloud storage, we’ve been very focused on telcos, media companies, etc. that are driving huge growth of file based data.
When I think about a storage cloud, one of the examples close to home for me is SnapFish (which is of course an HP company). They have a storage cloud and they have rather unique photo sharing requirements.
I am having a hard time seeing why the “more traditional corporate IT” departments (as you put it) need cloud storage. Yes, they are dealing with more file-based data but I’m not sure I see a storage cloud as the answer.
And yes, there are more companies popping up taking advantage of digital media as a core part of their business model but I don’t see storage cloud as a traditional IT solution.