Latest News from Mike Maxey

Hosting Providers Losing Business By Not Offering Cloud Storage Solution?

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 10:32:00 EDT

Tier1 analyst Antonio Piraino quantifies the public cloud service market to be around $300M in 2009 and conservatively estimates 100% growth per year for the next three years. Cloud storage is estimated to be about 40-60% of this market. Although cloud computing has garnered a lot of early attention, the near term opportunity is cloud storage, since customers can adopt it quickly without requiring too many programming tweaks to existing applications. Overall, cloud storage is an easier economic sale for the host, who can offer up his offering as an alternative to CAPEX spends on storage systems in a recession where data growth continues unabated. MSPs certainly risk losing business by not being able to offer up a cloud storage offering and allowing competitive cloud storage providers inroads into their accounts. And storage is a sticky service – once your competition is in your account, it is non-trivial to displace them.

Real-World Use Cases: Cloud Storage Workloads

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:02:00 EST

When choosing any storage solution it's important to consider the workload and data usage patterns. This even goes beyond storage – application workloads drive server, network and all IT infrastructure decisions. Sure, most vendors will tell you that their product is the best solution for any workload, and when choices were few, that was somewhat accurate.

1st International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo: Observations

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:00:00 EST

Last week the masses converged on San Jose for the SYS-CON convention that covered SOA, Virtualization and Cloud Computing. The event spanned three days and was very well attended. I was surprised at how crowded the sessions were given the state of the economy these days. People love a trend and Cloud Computing is no exception. I managed to catch a couple of interesting presentations on the cloud computing side that were standing room only.

Cloud Computing Public or Private? How to Choose Cloud Storage

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:15:00 EDT

Cloud storage is a relatively new concept that is becoming a more recognizable term in industry vernacular. Originally delivered as a service, it gained early popularity with Web 2.0 startups looking to outsource storage administration. As the concept spread and offerings expanded, the industry has now embraced two flavors of cloud storage: public and private.