Virteva Blog

Included below is a summary of a very interesting article summarizing a Forester report:

Some major points:

• Cloud computing will come on quicker than you think.
• Cloud computing will be controlled by a very few companies that will fight for the right to own your data.
• It is notable that the members of the cartel are all United States companies.
• They’re expecting to see specialization for different industry sectors.
• Besides central computing and storage, a big component will be providing core analytics.
• Differentiators will be in tool kits and data sets that customers can use (much like building blocks you get from SAP, etc., and just tailor to your requirements)

Fairly short article, but lots of thought provoking material.

Interesting blog writeup re VMworld, by Cisco’s Director of Desktop Virtualization.  http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/vmworld-vegas-2011-recap/

Definitely worth a read. Lots of good info about industry direction.  But also had some good discussion about VDI + storage, and Coraid in particular:

As more customers get comfortable with with desktop virtualization, they often remind us… “yes, we want to move more aggressively with desktop virtualization but going from a regular PC with the cheapest storage in the world into the datacenter with the most expensive storage in the world, those basic economics slow us down.”

Great point.  And then he goes on to talk about Coraid—

The storage startup at VMworld that seemed most intriguing to folks like Manny Rivelo (EVP, Cisco) and I was Coraid, a new SAN scale-out company not using FC, FCoE, or iSCSI. Instead, Coraid let’s customers mix-n-match any combination of SSD (Flash), SATA, and SAS drives attaching via Raw Ethernet.  The Coraid founder is Brantley Coile who invented a new protocol called ATA over Ethernet (AoE). This isn’t the first time Brantley has created something groundbreaking. He also holds the key patent for NAT (Network Address Translation) and built the company that gave Cisco’s its first stateful firewall and load-balancer back in the late 1990s.  It’s still early days for this startup but Coraid is one company to watch. According to Gartner, 40-60% of today’s VDI budgets are spent on storage but does anyone believe 40-60% of the solution value reside in that storage? If new innovations like AoE become pervasive in virtualized datacenters, those days of 40-60% of VDI spending toward storage may come to an end and more explosive adoption of virtual desktops will become a new reality.

So the IOPS situation with Coraid can be adequately dealt with (using things like Coraid’s new EtherFlash, and VDI architectures like Linked Clones), and they are developing quite a niche.