How service providers can have their cloud and keep it, too

Commentary - The challenges facing service providers are multifold. Over the last 10 to 15 years, their offerings have evolved from one dimensional services like DSL lines and phone lines to multidimensional services like server hosting, content delivery networks, messaging, virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI), and public/private managed services to name a few. And now Amazon and other cloud providers are growing at record rates leading cloud experts like Randy Bias to suggest that Amazon alone could achieve as much as $10 billion a year in annual sales by 2016 for just its cloud business. By growing to an estimated $500 million in cloud sales in the past three to four years, Amazon is already one of the fastest-growing service providers in history.

Service providers are, understandably, responding to the boom in cloud services offered by their competitors by announcing their own clouds. However, they have found it a challenge to match the economics and flexibility of Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid and others. To date, only KT has successfully launched a cloud offering that beats Amazon’s EC2 on both price and availability, and ability to match strict SLAs.

A big hindering cost in deploying cost-competitive clouds is the crushing prices of proprietary storage. Legacy enterprise storage solutions are completely proprietary and vertically integrated. Telcos are forced to buy the head unit, the storage controller and the software from the same vendor. Proprietary storage vendors source their components and mark up the prices by as much as 10 times the prices customers can buy the same components for in the open market. And yet the hardware is not differentiated. All major storage vendors, including OpenStorage vendors, now run their software on the same hardware designs, including the SBB standard, from the same set of vendors, such as LSI and Intel. The street price of legacy storage is frequently more expensive than the price at which Amazon sells the Amazon S3 service; purchasing legacy storage guarantees that telcos will lose money should they match the cloud market leaders.

KT’s cloud is made possible through the use of OpenStorage solutions, which are increasingly being chosen by service providers who want to match Amazon, GoGrid, and now KT with an equivalent solution. The first reason for this adoption is that OpenStorage is essentially what the major cloud service providers are using; there is little to no legacy storage technology in leading public clouds.

Here are a few additional reasons why commercial variants of OpenStorage are increasingly attractive to service providers entering the cloud business:

Time to market and the talent required - Years ago, service providers were some of the leading developers of core technology . For example, Bell research laboratories set the standards for innovation for almost a century by inventing the transistor and the early Unix operating systems upon which most storage solutions are built today.

Thanks in part to Moore’s Law and to the growth of viable open source stacks powering leading public clouds, that is not the case anymore. Traditional enterprise technology vendors to which carriers often turn do not have solutions that hit the flexibility, performance or cost requirements of a massive, 100PB+ scale cloud. Amazon, Google, Facebook and others led the transition from legacy storage and enterprise technologies years ago. So service providers are faced with a conundrum: neither they nor their traditional storage vendors have the capabilities needed to match Amazon and others—and yet match them they must.

Commercial OpenStorage solutions fill this gap as they combine the flexibility, performance and savings of open source software with the enterprise class features, reliability, and provable airtight data integrity that carriers require. Additionally, the existing adoption of OpenStorage by the largest telco clouds, including that of KT, means that commercial OpenStorage vendors can now help to architect, grow and operate massive-scale clouds that telcos need to get into the market as soon as this year.

One Storage solution for all their needs - In part because of the scale and variety of their offerings and the scarcity of operational talent, carriers prefer single solutions that can serve mulitiple purposes, which saves on the time and expense of achieving scale across these many services. Storage, as a fundamental building block of any service, must be treated as the least common denominator. A software-based OpenStorage solution that is flexible with open APIs, and feature rich, including deduplication, compression, provable long-term data integrity and cloning, and able to meet the performance requirements of diverse data types, from massive video files to the tiny reads and writes required for VDI, allows telcos to standardize on one design that can be used for their multiple services. Peel back the cloud offerings of Google, Facebook, Amazon and others and you’ll see a striking homogeneity up and down the stack; Facebook’s recent open compute announcement further emphasizes the extent to which standardization is perhaps just as important as savings through commodification in achieving Internet scale operations.

Freedom of choice - OpenStorage is all about providing freedom of choice to telcos along the entire stack. Telcos combine industry standard hardware with OpenStorage software without the vendor lock-in that plagues today’s legacy storage technologies. For example, for some use cases, the same data on disk can be managed by one OpenStorage vendor’s solutions today and by a free, open source solution tomorrow without the months of migration time required to shift away from legacy storage solutions. Similarly, existing systems can be used today for third tier long-term storage and tomorrow can be upgraded in place through the addition of improved servers and SSDs, so that it can deliver the millions of IOPS required by large VDI deployments, as one example. OpenStorage means no more forklifts in the data center.

Access to Innovation - OpenStorage software is supported by a community of vendors who lead their respective industries in innovation. As the Amazon example shows, this powerful combination helps spur faster time to market and drives better storage economics. Traditional proprietary storage solutions are gate keepers to the latest innovation in hardware technology – it takes 18 – 20 months before they can bring the latest hardware innovations to the market and their reliance on a proprietary OS with proprietary file systems means that every enhancement they want to make them significant development time. By contrast, the foundation of leading OpenStorage solutions are widely adopted operating systems like the Solaris kernel, meaning that these systems are already natively able to handle the multitude of tomorrow’s core servers without spending the millions of dollars and risk the years of effort legacy storage vendors face in order to keep up. This means that with OpenStorage, telcos get access to the latest technologies immediately upon their general availability -- their only hope as they try to keep up with the pace set by Amazon and others.

In summary, OpenStorage is the only viable solution to the storage crisis telcos face when they rely on legacy storage solutions. The increased adoption of alternative methods by telcos indicates a sea change in the storage market at large, and one that will be very interesting to watch in the years to come.

biography
Evan Powell is currently CEO of Nexenta Systems. Most recently Evan was founding CEO and then VP of Marketing and Business Development at Clarus Systems, a provider of IP Communications management software.