Category: Market dynamics

Mobile is exploding

Posted on by Ray in Corporate growth, Data growth, Information economy, Internet traffic, Market dynamics, Mobile computing, Networking, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Systems


We have talked about this before but more facts have come to light regarding the explosion of mobile data traffic, signaling a substantive change in how the world accesses information. In the Rise of mobile and the death of the rest the focus was on the business risks and opportunities coming from the rise of mobile computing.

Just yesterday, in an article in MIT’s Technology Review there was even more evidence of the rise of mobile.  The article, titled Four Charts That Illustrate the Transformation of Personal Computing was a summation of a Mary Meeker of KPCB presentation on the state of the internet (slide share embedded above).

The MIT article had one chart (see slide 15 above in Mary’s deck) that showed mobile internet traffic in November 2012 was 13% of all internet traffic which grew from a base level of ~1% in Dec 2009.  So in roughly 3 years, mobile traffic is consuming over 13X more internet bandwidth than any other type of device.

Just in case you needed more convincing, in another article in MIT Technical Review (this one on spectrum sharing) Cisco was quoted as saying that mobile traffic would grow 18X by 2016.

If mobile’s winning, who’s losing?

That has got to be desktop computing.  In fact, another chart (slide 16 in Mary’s deck) showed a comparison of India’s internet traffic tracking desktop vs mobile devices, from December 2008 to November 2012. In this chart India’s mobile internet exceeded desktop traffic sometime the middle of this year.

But I think the one chart that tells this better (see one slide 25) shows that smartphones and tablets shipments exceeded desktops and laptops in 2010.  The other interesting thing is that one can also see the gradual decline in desktops and laptop shipments since then.

Where’s the revenue streams?

The funny thing about Mary’s presentation is the fact that she was tracking mobile app and mobile advertising (see slide 17) as a rising revenue opportunity, expected to reach $19B in 2012.  In my post on the rise of Mobile, I assumed that mobile advertising would not be a successful model for mobile revenue streams – I was wrong.

Mary’s presentation also showed some of the impact of mobile on other markets and foretells the future impacts mobile will have. One telling example for this is standalone camera sales vs mobile camera shipments (see slide 32) which crossed over in 2008 where standalone camera sales peaked at~150M units. The same thing happened with standalone personal navigation devices (PND)  (see slide 34) that peaked 13M units in 2009 but where Waze unit (mobile navigation aid) exceeded PND unit shipments in Q1 2012.

The remainder of the presentation (at least what I read) seemed to define a new life-style option she called Asset-Light which was all about shedding physical assets like wallets, paperback books, TV and other screens, fixed LAN connectivity and moving to a completely mobile world where everything you need is on your tablet with access to the internet via WiFi or LTE.

Mobile is here, better get ready and figure out how to do business with it or consider this a great time to curtail your growth prospects.

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VMworld first thoughts kickoff session

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Corporate growth, desktop virtualization, Distributed computing, Market dynamics, Networking, R&D measures, Server virtualization, Software Defined Network, Strategic Inflection Points, Systems, Virtual Machine recovery, Visionary organizations, WAN

[Edited for readability. RLL] The drummer band was great at the start but we couldn’t tell if it was real or lipsynched. It turned out that each of the Big VMWORLD letters had a digital drum pad on them which meant it was live, in realtime.

Paul got a standing ovation as he left the stage introducing Pat the new CEO.  With Paul on the stage, there was much discussion of where VMware has come the last four years.  But IDC stats probably say it better than most in 2008 about 25% of Intel X86 apps were virtualized and in 2012 it’s about 60% and and Gartner says that VMware has about 80% of that activity.

Pat got up on stage and it was like nothing’s changed. VMware is still going down the path they believe is best for the world a virtual data center that spans private, on premises equipment and extrenal cloud service providers equipment.

There was much ink on software defined data center which is taking the vSphere world view and incorporating networking, more storage, more infrastructure to the already present virtualized management paradigm.

It’s a bit murky as to what’s changed, what’s acquired functionality and what’s new development but suffice it to say that VMware has been busy once again this year.

A single “monster vm” (has it’s own facebook page) now supports up to 64 vCPUs, 1TB of RAM, and can sustain more than a million IOPS. It seems that this should be enough for most mission critical apps out there today. No statement on latency the IOPS but with a million IOS a second and 64 vCPUs we are probably talking flash somewhere in the storage hierarchy.

Pat mentioned that the vRAM concept is now officially dead. And the pricing model is now based on physical CPUs and sockets. It no longer has a VM or vRAM component to it. Seemed like this got lots of applause.

There are now so many components to vCloud Suite that it’s almost hard to keep track of them all:  vCloud Director, vCloud Orchestrator, vFabric applications director, vCenter Operations Manager, of course vSphere and that’s not counting relatively recent acquisitions Dynamic Op’s a cloud dashboard and Nicira SDN services and I am probably missing some of them.

In addition to all that VMware has been working on Serengeti which is a layer added to vSphere to virtualize Hadoop clusters. In the demo they spun up and down a hadoop cluster with MapReduce operating to process log files.  (I want one of these for my home office environments).

Showed another demo of the vCloud suite in action spinning up a cloud data center and deploying applications to it in real time. Literally it took ~5minutes to start it up until they were deploying applications to it.  It was a bit hard to follow as it was going a lot into the WAN like networking environment configuration of load ballancing, firewalls and other edge security and workload characteristics but it all seemed pretty straightforward and took a short while but configured an actual cloud in minutes.

I missed the last part about social cast but apparently it builds a social network of around VMs?  [Need to listen better next time]

More to follow…

 

The rise of mobile and the death of rest

Posted on by Ray in Information economy, Market dynamics, Mobile computing, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy

Read a couple of articles this week about the rise of mobile computing.  About a decade ago I was at a conference where one of the keynotes was on the inevitability of ubiquitous computing or everywhere computing.  I believe now that smart phones have arrived, we have realized that dream.

How big companies die

One article I read was from Forbes on Here’s why Google and Facebook might disappear in the next 5 years.  The central tenet of their discussion was that the rise of mobile is a new paradigm shift just like Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 emerged over time and reinvented most of the industries that went before them.

Most companies around before the internet were unable to see and understand what would constitute a viable business model in the new Web 1.0 environment. Similarly, the major players in Web 1.0 never really saw the transition that occurred to a more interactive, information sharing that became Web 2.0.

The problem is that all these companies grew up in the reigning paradigm of the day and became successful by seeing the transition as a new way of doing business. They just couldn’t conceive that another way of doing business was coming along that was strategically different and thus, highly damaging to their now outdated, business models.

Full speed ahead

But it even get’s worse. Another article I read from Tecnology Review was titled Questions for Mobile Computing.

One interesting tidbit is that time it’s taking to reach a certain adoption level in the market is shrinking. The chart (from Apple) showed that both the iPhone and iPad has drastically shrunk the time it took to attain high market adoption.

Mobile business models

The main question in the article was how web 2.0 advertising revenue business models were going to translate into a mobile environment where they no longer controlled advertising.  Many Web2.0 companies seem to be ignoring mobile at the moment but it won’t take long for companies focused on this new computing tsunami to roll over them.

Apple and Google have taken two distinctly divergent approaches to this market but at least they are (massively) engaged.  That’s more than can be said for some of the web 2.0 properties out there ignoring mobile to their long term detriment.

The fact is that mobile is a new computing platform.  It’s possibilities are truly extraordinary from mHealth (see my post on mHealth taking off in Kenya) and  mCurrency today to Google glasses of tomorrow.

I strongly believe that those companies that see this shift now and go after it with new business models to profit from mobile computing will succeed faster and mightier than we have ever seen.   The rest will be left in the dust.

The funny bit is that it’s not the developed world that’s taking the new model to new directions but the developing world.  They seem better able to see mobile computing for what it is, an relatively easy way to leapfrog from the 19th century to the 21st in one jump.

So what are profitable business models that leverage mobile computing?

Mobile health (mHealth) takes off in Kenya

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Distributed computing, Information economy, Market dynamics, Strategic Inflection Points, Systems, Visionary leadershp
iHanging out with Kenya Techies by whiteafrican (cc) (from Flickr)
Hanging out with Kenya Techies by whiteafrican (cc) (from Flickr)

Read an article today about startups and others in Kenya  providing electronic medical care via mHealth and improving the country’s health care system (see Kenya’s Startup Boom).

It seems that four interns were able to create a smartphone and web App in a little over 6 months, to help track Kenya’s infectious disease activity.   They didn’t call it healthcare-as-a-service nor was there any mention of the cloud in the story, but they were doing it all, just the same.

Old story, new ending

The Kenyan government was in the process of contracting out the design and deployment of a new service that would track the cases of infectious disease throughout the country to enable better strategies to counteract them.  They were just about ready to sign a $1.9M contract with one mobile phone company when they decided it was inappropriate for them to lock-in a single service provider.

So they decided to try a different approach, they contacted the head of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) who contacted an instructor at Strathmore University who identified four recent graduates and set them to work as interns for $150/month. They spent the spring and summer gathering requirements and pounding out the App(s).  At the end of the summer it was up and running on smart phones and the web throughout their country.

They are now working on an SMS version of the system to allow others who do not own smart phones to be able to use the system to record infectious disease activity. They are also taking on a completely new task to try and track government drug shipments to hospitals and clinics to eliminate shortages and waste.

mHealth, the future of healthcare

The story cited above says that there are at least 45 mHealth programs actively being developed or already completed in Kenya. Many of them created by a startup incubator called iHub.  We have written about Kenya’s use of mobile phones to support novel services before (see Is cloud a leapfrog technology).

Some of these mHealth projects include:

  • AMPATH which uses OpenMRS (open sourced medical records platform) and SMS messaging to remind HIV patients to take their medicines and provides call-in for questions about the medication or treatments,
  • Daktari, a mobile service provider’s call-a-doc service that provides a phone-in hot-line for medical questions, in a country with only one doctor per every 6000 citizens, such phone-in health care can more effectively leverage the meagre healthcare resources available,
  • MedAfrica App which provides doctors or dentists phone numbers and menus to find basic healthcare and diagnostic information in Kenya.

There are many others mHealth projects on the drawing board including a national electronic medical records (EMR) service, medical health payment cards loaded up using mobile payments, and others.

Electronic medical care through mHealth

It seems that Kenya is becoming a leading edge provider of mHealth solutions based in the cloud mainly because it’s inexpensive, fits well with technology that pervades the country, and can be scaled up rapidly to cover its citizens.

If Kenya can move to deploy healthcare-as-a-service using mobile phones, so can the rest of the third world.

Speaking of mHealth, I got a new free app on my iPhone the other day called iTriage, check it out.

Comments?

 

Why EMC is doing Project Lightening and Thunder

Posted on by Ray in Data efficiency, Distributed computing, Market dynamics, Scenario planning, SSD storage, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategic planning, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp
Picture of atmospheric lightening striking ground near a building at night
rayo 3 by El Garza (cc) (from Flickr)

Although technically Project Lightening and Thunder represent some interesting offshoots of EMC software, hardware and system prowess,  I wonder why they would decide to go after this particular market space.

There are plenty of alternative offerings in the PCIe NAND memory card space.  Moreover, the PCIe card caching functionality, while interesting is not that hard to replicate and such software capability is not a serious barrier of entry for HP, IBM, NetApp and many, many others.  And the margins cannot be that great.

So why get into this low margin business?

I can see a couple of reasons why EMC might want to do this.

  • Believing in the commoditization of storage performance.  I have had this debate with a number of analysts over the years but there remain many out there that firmly believe that storage performance will become a commodity sooner, rather than later.  By entering the PCIe NAND card IO buffer space, EMC can create a beachhead in this movement that helps them build market awareness, higher manufacturing volumes, and support expertise.  As such, when the inevitable happens and high margins for enterprise storage start to deteriorate, EMC will be able to capitalize on this hard won, operational effectiveness.
  • Moving up the IO stack.  From an applications IO request to the disk device that actually services it is a long journey with multiple places to make money.  Currently, EMC has a significant share of everything that happens after the fabric switch whether it is FC,  iSCSI, NFS or CIFS.  What they don’t have is a significant share in the switch infrastructure or anywhere on the other (host side) of that interface stack.  Yes they have Avamar, Networker, Documentum, and other software that help manage, secure and protect IO activity together with other significant investments in RSA and VMware.   But these represent adjacent market spaces rather than primary IO stack endeavors.  Lightening represents a hybrid software/hardware solution that moves EMC up the IO stack to inside the server.  As such, it represents yet another opportunity to profit from all the IO going on in the data center.
  • Making big data more effective.  The fact that Hadoop doesn’t really need or use high end storage has not been lost to most storage vendors.  With Lightening, EMC has a storage enhancement offering that can readily improve  Hadoop cluster processing.  Something like Lightening’s caching software could easily be tailored to enhance HDFS file access mode and thus, speed up cluster processing.  If Hadoop and big data are to be the next big consumer of storage, then speeding cluster processing will certainly help and profiting by doing this only makes sense.
  • Believing that SSDs will transform storage. To many of us the age of disks is waning.  SSDs, in some form or another, will be the underlying technology for the next age of storage.  The densities, performance and energy efficiency of current NAND based SSD technology are commendable but they will only get better over time.  The capabilities brought about by such technology will certainly transform the storage industry as we know it, if they haven’t already.  But where SSD technology actually emerges is still being played out in the market place.  Many believe that when industry transitions like this happen it’s best to be engaged everywhere change is likely to happen, hoping that at least some of them will succeed. Perhaps PCIe SSD cards may not take over all server IO activity but if it does, not being there or being late will certainly hurt a company’s chances to profit from it.

There may be more reasons I missed here but these seem to be the main ones.  Of the above, I think the last one, SSD rules the next transition is most important to EMC.

They have been successful in the past during other industry transitions.  If anything they have shown similar indications with their acquisitions by buying into transitions if they don’t own them, witness Data Domain, RSA, and VMware.  So I suspect the view in EMC is that doubling down on SSDs will enable them to ride out the next storm and be in a profitable place for the next change, whatever that might be.

And following lightening, Project Thunder

Similarly, Project Thunder seems to represent EMC doubling their bet yet again on the SSDs.  Just about every month I talk to another storage startup coming out in the market providing another new take on storage using every form of SSD imaginable.

However, Project Thunder as envisioned today is not storage, but rather some form of external shared memory.  I have heard this before, in the IBM mainframe space about 15-20 years ago.  At that time shared external memory was going to handle all mainframe IO processing and the only storage left was going to be bulk archive or migration storage – a big threat to the non-IBM mainframe storage vendors at the time.

One problem then was that the shared DRAM memory of the time was way more expensive than sophisticated disk storage and the price wasn’t coming down fast enough to counteract increased demand.  The other problem was making shared memory work with all the existing mainframe applications was not easy.  IBM at least had control over the OS, HW and most of the larger applications at the time.  Yet they still struggled to make it usable and effective, probably some lesson here for EMC.

Fast forward 20 years and NAND based SSDs are the right hardware technology to make  inexpensive shared memory happen.  In addition, the road map for NAND and other SSD technologies looks poised to continue the capacity increase and price reductions necessary to compete effectively with disk in the long run.

However, the challenges then and now seem as much to do with software that makes shared external memory universally effective as with the hardware technology to implement it.  Providing a new storage tier in Linux, Windows and/or VMware is easier said than done. Most recent successes have usually been offshoots of SCSI (iSCSI, FCoE, etc).  Nevertheless, if it was good for mainframes then, it certainly good for Linux, Windows and VMware today.

And that seems to be where Thunder is heading, I think.

Comments?

 

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IT as a service on the Cloud is not the end

Posted on by Ray in Cloud services, Information economy, Market dynamics, Strategic Inflection Points, System effectiveness, System quality
Prison Planet by AZRainman (cc) (from Flickr)
Prison Planet by AZRainman (cc) (from Flickr)

[Long post] Read another intriguing post by David Vellente at Wikibon today about the emergence of IT shops becoming service organizations to their industries using the cloud to hosting these services.  I am not in complete agreement with Dave but he certainly describes a convincing picture.

His main points are:

  • Cloud storage and cloud computing are emerging as a favorite platform for IT-as-a-service.
  • Specialization and economics of scale will generate an IT-as-a-service capability for any organization’s information processing needs.

I would have to say another tenet of his overall discussion is that IT matters, a lot and I couldn’t agree more.

Cloud reality

For some reason I have been talking a lot about cloud storage this past couple of weeks, in multiple distinct venues.  On the one hand, I was talking with a VAR the other day and they were extremely excited about the opportunity in cloud storage. It seems getting SMB customers to sign up for a slice of storage is easy and once they have that, getting them to use more becomes a habit they can’t get rid of.

I thought maybe the enterprise level would be immune to such inducements, but no.  Another cloud storage gateway vendor,  StorSimple, I talked with recently was touting the great success they were having displacing tier 2 storage in the enterprise.

Lately, I heard that some small businesses/startups have decided to abandon their own IT infrastructure altogether and depend entirely on cloud offerings from Amazon, RackSpace and others for all they need.  They argue that such infrastructure, for all its current faults, will have less downtime than anything they could create on their own within a limited budget.

So, cloud seems to be taking off, everywhere I look.

Vertical support for IT as a service

Dave mentions plenty in his lengthy post that a number of sophisticated IT organizations are taking their internal services and becoming IT-as-a-service profit centers.  Yes, hard to disagree with this one as well.

But, it’s not the end of IT organizations

However, where I disagree with Dave is that he sees this as a winning solution, taking over all internal IT activities.  In his view, either your IT group becomes an external service profit center or it’s destined to be replaced by someone else’s service offering(s).

I don’t believe this. To say that IT as a service will displace 50+ years of technology development in the enterprise is just overstatement.

Dave talks about WINTEL, displacing mainframes as the two monopolies created in IT.  But the fact remains, WINTEL has not eliminated mainframes.  Mainframes still exist and arguably, today are still expanding through out the world.

Dave states that the introduction of WINTEL reduced the switching cost of mainframes, and that the internet and the cloud that follows, have reduced the costs yet again. I agree.  But, that doesn’t mean that switching cost is 0.

Ask anyone whether SalesForce.com switching cost inhibits them from changing services and more than likely they will say yes.  Switching costs have come down, but they are still a viable barrier to change.

Cloud computing and storage generates similar switching costs not to mention the time it takes to transfer TBs of data over a WAN.  Whether a cloud service uses AWS interface, OpenStack, Azzure or any of the other REST/SOAP cloud storage/cloud computing protocols is a formidable barrier to change.  It would be great if OpenStack were to take over but it hasn’t yet, and most likely won’t in the long run.  Mainly because the entrenched suppliers don’t want to help their competition.

IT matters, a lot to my organization

What I see happening is not that much different from what Dave sees, it’s only a matter of degree.  Some IT shops will become service organizations to their vertical but there will remain a large proportion of IT shops that see

  • That their technology is a differentiator.
  • That their technology is not something they want their competition using.
  • That their technology is too important to their corporate advantage to sell to others.

How much of this is reality vs. fiction is another matter.

Nonetheless, I firmly believe that a majority of IT shops that exist today will not convert to using IT as a service.   Some of this is due to sunk costs but a lot will be due to the belief that they are truly better than the service.

That’s not to say that new organizations, just starting out might be more interested in utilizing IT as a service.  For these entities, service offerings are going to be an appealing alternative.

However, a small portion of these startups may just as likely conclude that they can do better or believe it’s more important for them to develop their own IT services to help them get ahead.  Similarly, how much of this is make believe is TBD.

In the end, I believe IT as a service will take it’s place alongside IT developed services and IT outsourced development as yet another capability that any company can deploy to provide information processing for their organization.

The real problem

In my view, the real problem with IT developed services today is development disease.  Most organizations, would like increased functionality, and want it ASAP but they just can’t develop working functionality fast enough.  I call slow functionality development, missing critical features with lots of bugs development disease.  And it’s everywhere today and has never really gone away.

Some of this is due to poor IT infrastructure, some is due to the inability to use new development frameworks, and some of it is due to a lack of skills.  If IT had some pill they could take to help them develop business processing faster, consuming less resources with much fewer bugs and fuller functionality, they would never consider IT as a service.

That’s where the new frameworks of Ruby on Rails, SpringForce and the like are exciting. Their promise is providing faster functionality with fewer failures. When that happens, organizations will move away from IT as a service in droves, and back to internally developed capabilities.

But, we’re not there yet.

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Smart thermostats make for smarter grids

Posted on by Ray in Distributed computing, Energy efficiency, Information economy, Market dynamics, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Systems
Untitled by johnwilson1969
Untitled by johnwilson1969

We have been discussing off and on how smart power meters (see Smart metering data storage appetite) and intelligent sensors (see the Sensor cloud comes home) such as smart thermostats generate copious amounts of data.  Sensors and meters such as these are used in a new power distribution network called the smart grid.

But recently there was a report in Technology Review of how smart thermostats can “communicate” with power companies to determine current energy costs and then alter temperature settings to reduce power use.

Power companies give discounts to those customers who install the smart thermostats in the hope that such devices will lower peak power use.  If this happens they will save significant investments in new power generation and power lines to satisfy the ever-growing peak power level. This probably works best in summer with A/C equipment which is a prime user of electricity during peak consumption periods. The story goes on to say that these smart thermostats have been used in a small test bed but are about to be rolled out on a wider basis.

Power thrashing?!

One serious concern brought up in the article is that when such devices are rolled out on a large scale there is a high chance of power thrashing.

As smart thermostats reduce home power consumption in volume, they may end up driving the cost of power down low enough such that the thermostats, on the next cycle, will start to consume more power, leading to power thrashing.

If this happens on a big enough region, such oscillations of power use may lead to an even higher peak than what was in place prior to the smart grid.  And if the thermostats have been in place for a while and succeeded in reducing peak power capabilities, such thrashing may lead to a smart grid crash or congestion collapse.

Thrashing prevention on the power grid

There are three ways to prevent power thrashing:

  • Increase the amount of peak power to handle the worst case regional energy working set.
  • Decrease the power consumption of the largest power users.
  • Decrease the number of consumers.

It would seem the first solution defeats the purpose of the smarter grid.  I believe the second approach can best be implemented by having even more smart appliances which can reduce power consumption on demand.  As for the third approach, this may be infeasible, as you cannot just drop power to consumers without some serious consequences.

Dumb grid solutions

We have for a couple of years now received a discount on our power bill by having a special device attached to our A/C unit that reduces our power consumption on one day a year. It’s not quite as intelligent as the smart thermostats discussed above but it does the job (at least once/year).  Such devices, used on a large scale could provide the capabilities of the smart thermostat but eliminate the potential for thrashing and large power oscillations.

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So the smart grid is coming but the smarter it gets the more care we need to take in implementing it.

Comments?

Server virtualization vs. storage virtualization

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Cloud storage, Disk storage, File Storage, Information economy, Market dynamics, Server virtualization, SSD storage, Storage architecture, storage economics, Storage performance, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategic planning, System effectiveness, Visionary leadershp
Functional Fusion? by Cain Novocaine (cc) (from Flickr)
Functional Fusion? by Cain Novocaine (cc) (from Flickr)

One can only be perplexed by the seemingly overwelming adoption of server virtualization and contrast that with the ho-hum, almost underwelming adoption of storage virtualization.  Why is there this significant a difference?

I think the problem is partly due to the lack of an common understanding of storage performance utilization.

Why server virtualization succeeded

One significant driver of server virtualization is the precipitous drop in server utilization that occurred over the last decade when running single applications on a physical server.  It was nothing to see real processor utilization of less than 10% and consequently it was easy to envision that executing 5-10 applications on the single server. And what’s more each new generation of server kept getting more powerful, handling double the MIPs every 18 months or so driven by Moore’s law.

The other factor was that application workloads weren’t increasing that much. Yes new applications would come online but they seldom consumed an inordinate amount of MIPs and were often similar to what was already present. So application processing growth while not flatlining, was expanding at a relatively slow speed.

Why storage virtualization has failed

Data on the other hand continues its never ending exponential growth. Doubling every 3-5 years or less. And the fact that you have more data, almost always requires more storage hardware to support the IOPs being required to support it.

In the past the storage IOP rates was intrinsically tied to the number of disk heads available to service the load.  Although disk performance grew it wasn’t doubling every 18 months, and real per disk performance was actually going down over time, measured as the amount of IOPS per GB.

This drove proliferation of disk spindles and as such, storage subsystems in the data center. Storage virtualization couldn’t reduce the number of spindles required to support the workload.

Thus, if you look at storage performance from the perspective of % IOPS one could support per disk, most  sophisticated systems were running anywhere from 75% to 150% (based on DRAM caching).

Paradigm shift ahead

But SSDs can change this dynamic considerably.  A typical SSD can sustain 10-100K IOPs and there is some liklihood that this will increase with each generation that comes out but the application requirements will not increase as fast.  Hence, , there is a high liklihood that normal data center utilisation of SSD storage perfomance will start to drop below 50% or more, when that happens. -torage virtualization may start to make a lot more sense.

Maybe when (SSD) data storage starts moving more in line with Moore’s law, storage virtualization will become a more dominant paradigm for data center storage use.

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Any bets on who the VMware of storage virtualization will be?

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