What's holding back the cloud?

Cloud whisps by turtlemom4bacon
Cloud whisps by turtlemom4bacon

Steve Duplessie’s recent post on how the lack of scarcity will be a gamechanger got me thinking. Free is good but the simplicity of the user/administrative interface is worth paying for. And it’s that simplicity that pays off for me.

Ease of use

I agree wholeheartedly with Steve about what and where people should spend their time today. Tweetdeck, the Mac, and the iPhone are three key examples that make my business life easier (most of the time).

  • TweetDeck allows me to filter who I am following all while giving me access to any and all of them.
  • The Mac leaves me much more time to do what needs to be done and allows me to spend less time on non-essential stuff.
  • The iPhone has 1000’s of app’s which make my idle time that much more productive.

Nobody would say any of these things are easy to create and for most of them (Tweetdeck is free at the moment) I pay a premium for these products. All these products have significant complexity to offer the simple user and administrative interface they supply.

The iPhone is probably closest to the cloud from my perspective. But it performs poorly (compared to broadband) and service (ATT?) is spotty.  Now these are nuisances in a cell phone which can be lived with.  If this were my only work platform they would be deadly.

Now the cloud may be easy to use because it removes the administrative burden but that’s only one facet of using it. I assume using most cloud services are as easy as signing up on the web and then recoding applications to use the cloud provider’s designated API. This doesn’t sound easy to me. (Full disclosure I am not a current cloud user and thus, cannot talk about it’s ease of use).

Storm clouds

However, today the cloud is not there for other reasons – availability concerns, security concerns, performance issues, etc. All these are inhibitors today and need to be resolved before the cloud can reach the mainstream or maybe be my platform of choice. Also, I have talked before on some other issues with the cloud.

Aside from those inhibitors, the other main problems with the cloud are lack of applications I need to do business today.  Google Apps and MS Office over the net are interesting but not sufficient.  Not sure what is sufficient and that would depend on your line of business but server and desktop platforms had the same problem when they started out. However servers and desktops have evolved over time from killer apps to providing needed application support. The cloud will no doubt follow, over time.

In the end, the cloud needs to both grow up and evolve to host my business model and I would presume many others as well. Personally I don’t care if my data&apps are hosted on the cloud or hosted on office machines. What matters to me are security, reliability, availability, and useability. When the cloud can support me in the same way that the Mac can, then who hosts my applications will be a purely economic decision.

The cloud and net are just not there yet.

Tape v Disk v SSD v RAM

There was a time not long ago when the title of this post wouldn’t have included SSD. But, with the history of the last couple of years, SSD has earned its right to be included.

A couple of years back I was at a Rocky Mountain Magnetics Seminar (see IEEE magnetics societies) and a disk drive technologist stated that Disks have about another 25 years of technology roadmap ahead of them. During this time they will continue to increase density, throughput and other performance metrics. After 25 years of this they will run up against some theoretical limits which will halt further density progress.

At the same seminar, the presenter said that Tape was lagging Disk technology by about 5-10 years or so. As such, tape should continue to advance for another 5-10 years after disk stops improving at which time tape would also stop increasing density.

Does all this mean the end of tape and disk? I think not. Paper stopped advancing in density theoretically about 2 to 3000 years ago (the papyrus scroll was the ultimate in paper “rotating media”). If we move up to the codex or book form- which in my view is a form factor advance – this took place around 400AD (see history of scroll and codex). Paperback, another form factor advance, took place in the early 20th century (see paperback history).

Turning now to write performance, moveable type was a significant paper (write) performance improvement and started in the mid 15th century. The printing press would go on to improve (paper write) performance for the next six centuries (see printing press history) and continues today.

All this indicates that some data technology, whose density was capped over 2000 years ago, can continue to advance and support valuable activity in today’s world and for the foreseeable future. “Will disk and tape go away” is the wrong question, the right question is “can disk or tape, after SSDs reach price equivalence on a $/GB basis, still be useful to the world”?

I think yes, but that depends on a number of factors as to how the relative SSD-Disk-Tape technologies advance. Assuming someday all these technologies support equivalent Tb/SqIn or spatial density and

  • SSD’s retain their relative advantage in random access speed,
  • Tape it’s advantage in sequential throughput, volumetric density, and long media life, and
  • Disk it’s all around, combined sequential and random access advantage

It seems likely that each can sustain some niche in the data center/home office of tomorrow, although probably not where they are today.

One can see trends being enacted in the enterprise data centers today that are altering the relative positioning of SSDs, disks and tape. Tape is now being relegated to long term, archive storage, Disk is moving to medium-term, secondary storage and SSDs is replacing top tier, primary storage.

More thoughts on this in future posts.