cloud economics – Silverton Consulting

Cirtas system (from www.Cirtas.com) — Cirtas system (from http://www.Cirtas.com)

Yesterday, Cirtas came out of stealth mode and into the lime-light with their new Bluejet cloud storage controller hardware system. Cirtas joins a number of other products offering cloud storage to the enterprise by supplying a more standard interface which we have discussed before (see Cloud storage gateways surface).

With Cirtas, the interface to the backend cloud storage is supplied as iSCSI, similar to StorSimple‘s product we reviewed previously (see More cloud storage gateways …). However, StorSimple is focused on Microsoft environments only and select applications, namely Sharepoint, Exchange and Microsoft file services. Cirtas seems aimed at the more general purpose application environment that uses iSCSI storage protocols. The only other iSCSI cloud storage gateway providers appear to be TwinStrata and Panzura but the information on Panzura’s website is sketchy.

In addition, Cirtas, StorSimple (and Panzura) provide hardware appliances whereas most of the other cloud storage gateways (Nasuni, Gladinet, TwinStrata) only come as software packages. Although Gladinet appears to be targeted at the home office environment.

Cirtas’s Bluejet controller includes onboard RAM cache, SSD flash drives and SAS drives (5TB total) that is used to provide higher performing cloud storage access. Bluejet also supports space efficient snapshots, data encryption, thin provisioning, data deduplication, and data compression. The Cirtas team comes out of the WAN optimization space so they have incorporated some of these data saving technologies into their product to reduce bandwidth requirement and cloud storage demand.

Cirtas currently supports Amazon S3 and IronMountain cloud storage but more are on the way. They also recently completed their Series A round of funding which included NEA and Amazon.

Cirtas says they can support local storage performance but have no benchmarks to prove this out. With iSCSI there aren’t many benchmark options but one could use iSCSI to support Microsoft Exchange and submit something on the Exchange Solution Review Program (ESRP) which might show off this capability.

Nonetheless, cloud storage can be considerably cheaper than primary storage ($/GB basis) and no doubt even with the ~$70K Cirtas Bluejet cloud storage controller, Cirtas supports a significant cost advantage. With the appliance purchase, you get a basic storage key which allows you to store up to 20TB of data on (through) the appliance, if you have more data to store, additional storage keys can be purchased separately. This 20TB license does not include the cloud storage costs for storing data on the cloud nor the bandwidth costs to upload and/or access the data on the cloud.

Seems like interest in cloud storage gateways/controllers is heating up, with the addition of Cirtas I count at least 4 that target the enterprise space and when Panzura releases a product that will add another.

Anything I missed?

Moore’s Law by Marcin Wichary (cc) (from Flickr)

I have been struggling for sometime now to understand why cloud computing and cloud storage have suddenly become so popular. We have previously discussed some of cloud problems (here and here) but we have never touched on why cloud has become so popular.

In my view, SaaS or ASPs and MSPs have been around for a decade or more now and have been renamed cloud computing and storage but they have rapidly taken over the IT discussion. Why now?

At first I thought this new popularity was due to the prevalence of higher bandwidth today. But later I determined that this was too simplistic. Now I would say the reasons cloud services have become so popular, include

Bandwidth costs have decreased substantially
Hardware costs have decreased substantially
Software costs remain flat

Given the above one would think that non-cloud computing/storage would also be more popular today and you would be right. But, there is something about the pricing reduction available from cloud services which substantially increases interest.

For example, at $10,000 per widget, a market size may be ok, at $100/widget the market becomes larger still, and at $1/widget the market can be huge. This is what seems to have happened to Cloud services. Pricing has gradually decreased, brought about through hardware and bandwidth cost reductions and has finally reached a point where the market has grown significantly.

Take email for example:

Microsoft Exchange costs $67/CAL (client access license) and a Standard Edition Exchange 2010 server license costs $699 (Enterprise Edition is $3999). BTW, these are the same prices as Exchange 2007 and as far as I can tell similar to Exchange 2003 pricing.
Google gmail enterprise license costs $50/user and Microsoft Exchange Online costs $5/user month ($60/year) with a 5 user minimum.

Now with Google or Exchange Online you have to supply internet access or the bandwidth required to access the email account. For Exchange, you would also need to provide the internet access to get email in and out of your environment, servers and storage to run Exchange server, and would use internal LAN resources to distribute that email to internally attached clients. I would venture to say the similar pricing differences applies to CRM, ERP, storage etc. which could be hosted in your data center or used as a cloud service. Also, over the last decade these prices have been coming down for cloud services but have remained (relatively) flat for on premises services.

How does such pricing affect market size?

Well, when it costs ~$1034 (+ server costs + admin time) to field 5 Exchange email accounts vs. $250 for 5 Gmail ($300 for 5 Exchange Online) accounts the assumption is that the market will increase, maybe not ~12X but certainly 3X or more. At ~$3000 or more, I need a substantially larger justification to introduce enterprise email services but at $250, justification becomes much simpler.

Moreover, the fact that the entry pricing is substantially smaller, i.e., $~2800 for one Exchange Standard Edition account vs $50 for one (Gmail) email account, justification becomes almost a non-issue and the market size grows geometrically. In the past, pricing for such services may have prohibited small business use, but today cloud pricing makes them very affordable and as such, more widely adopted.

I suppose there is another inflection point at $0.50/mail user that would increase market size even more. However, at some point anybody in the world with internet access could afford enterprise email services and I don’t think the market could grow much larger.

So there you have it. Why cloud, why now – the reasons are hardware and bandwidth pricing have come down giving rise to much more affordable cloud services opening up more market participants at the low end. But it’s not just SMB customers that can now take advantage of these lower priced services, large companies can also now afford to implement applications which were too costly to introduce before.

Yes, cloud services can be slow and yes, cloud services can be insecure but, the price can’t be beat.

As to why software pricing has remained flat must remain a mystery for now but may be treated in some future post.

Any other thoughts as to why cloud’s popularity has increased so much?