Friday, December 24, 2010

Maggie's Last Christmas

Maggie doesn't know about Jesus being God or about tomorrow being his birthday.

She thinks we're nuts for dragging a tree in the house, and she doesn't get the point of hanging lights outside.

She sees fine in the dark.

If Jesus came by the house tomorrow, she'd bite his butt. She does that. She's bitten the drum teacher, most of Lily's friends, a few of David's, my sister-in-law, brother-in-law, the Zoots guy, and probably a few dozen others.

So I'm pretty sure if a bearded guy, with long hair, and a robe came to the door, she'd take a little chomp of His butt, too.

She can't help it.

Maggie likes big butts...I cannot lie...

and thighs, and the occasional ankle.


Monday, December 6, 2010

SSP Failure to Cloud Storage Success - What a Difference a Decade Makes

Storability 10 year Reunion
Years ago, a few buddies and I started one of the first cloud storage providers. Of course, we didn’t call it cloud storage back then, but we merry band of brithers (and sisters), we first generation Storage Service Providers (1gSSPs) were cloud storage way before the cloud was cool.

All the 1gSSPs – StorageNetworks, ScaleEight, StorageWay, Sanrise, and others – failed. The core problem was and still is that renting raw capacity over the network is a lousy business model.
  • 1gSSPs couldn’t sustainably buy their storage cheaper than their retail customers (although over a beer I can share some great stories of how the early 1gSSP robber-barron’s ‘negotiated’ with the storage vendors during the boom).
  • SSPs couldn’t sustainably offer broad enough management efficiencies to generate profits.
  • SSPs couldn’t overcome a host of logistic and cultural issues (network performance/cost, stigma/liability of releasing core data, etc).
After the bust, and the 911 attacks, the entire business simply collapsed. Some of us – my company, Storability and others like Arsenal Digital - managed to flip over to providing managed storage services – running NOCs, and doing backups and restores for our customers. Wasn’t a great business, but we survived long enough to eventually be sold off.

For those interested in an unbiased history of the 1gSSP market, there is a thorough and thoughtful analysis from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) posted here.

Ten years later, things look different, and the same.

A whole host of storage service providers – nee’ cloud storage providers – has arisen, not so much from the ashes of the 1gSSPs, but certainly with their dust in the new CSP DNA. These folks have it a little easier than we did back then, and I think more than a few of them are going to make an honest living this time.

In addition to the obvious improvements in network connectivity, bandwidth, and reliability, I see three critical changes that I believe will mark the difference between the past failure of 1gSSPs and the future success of today’s Cloud Storage Providers – file systems, file virtualization, and file storage gateways.