Speaker 1: And now Silicon Angle TV and Wikibon.org present a focus spotlight, live from Las Vegas
and VMworld 2011. Host John Furrier and Dave Vellante illuminating New Models for Cloud
Service Providers with support from Solid Fire.
Dave: Hi everybody we're back. This is Dave Vellante from Wikibon.org and this is Silicon
Angle and siliconangle.tv's continuous coverage of VMworld 2011. Um, I just want, uh, let
the audience know out there, uh, if you want to get full coverage of VMworld, go to siliconangle.com,
go to siliconangle.tv, go to Wikibon, check it out, you got questions, hopefully we have
answers. Uh, this is the Cloud Service Providers spotlight segment. We're profiling new storage
architectures and new enablement. Uh, a, a focus of this spotlight has been
quality of service, enabling new applications. Um, and we've got, uh, a panel now that
we're going to have a discussion around, uh, these topics. We just heard, uh, uh, SoftLayer
and Virtue's Stream, two very interesting disruptive cloud service providers. Uh, a
Duke Skarda is back and, and Matt Theurer from Virtue's Stream, uh, Duke from Soft,
uh, SoftLayer, and we're also joined by David Wright, uh, CEO of, uh, Solid Fire and
also founder of, uh, Solid Fire, uh, as well. So welcome gentlemen.
David: Thank you. Dave: Thanks for coming on the cube. So, uh,
uh, David we heard, uh, from Virtues Stream itself, uh, Dave I'd like to start, uh,
with you. Solid Fire, new company just came out of itself, we met, uh, actually at, uh,
in May, David: Yeah.
Dave: At EMC world, ironically. Um, tell us about Solid Fire.
David: Yes, so, uh, you know, Solid Fire was really born out of my experience at, uh, at
another cloud service provider at Rackspace. Uh, I was there for about a year and a half
after they acquired my last company and, and really saw a lot of the challenges, uh, that
Duke and Matt talked about earlier with providing storage in a cloud environment providing,
uh, both the scalable storage that's needed as well as the performance, the quality of
service, uh, the availability, everything that's expected of storage in the cloud
and, and that was really the genesis of Solid Fire. The desire to solve some of these challenges
with traditional storage use really interesting technology like solid state, uh, compression,
do duplication, efficiency technologies, uh, to solve both the performance as well as the
scalability, cost challenges of, of primary storage for cloud.
Dave: Let's, so, um, let's get right into it. I mean, maybe, maybe share with our audience
who, might, you know oftentimes we get the CNBC Wall Street journal crowd listen again
and they might not be as familiar with some of the issues and, uh, in the areas of storage.
So, um, the problem is if I could set it up and then you guys can, can correct me or drill
in a little further is, you know, for years, uh, applications have assumed that there's
going to spending discount there and spending discount is low compared to, um, uh, semiconductor
speeds. Um, and now this, so this concept of flash comes in for the first time we have
persistent flash, um, that is much, much faster and it sort of changes the way we think about
applications but, there's, there's a drawback, it's expensive. Um, so what we've seen
now is tons of innovation in flash, all these money pouring in and we're starting to see
prices and configurations come in line with traditional arrays, right?
David: Yeah. Dave: That changes the way you guys thinks
about our architecting storage, so, so, why don't we start, um, uh, uh, right to left,
uh, with Matt. How does that change the way in which you think about storage?
Matt: All right, so, so the advent of the, uh, the speed and the performance of flash
is really, in, in, a lot of ways it's inverted what's been the traditional problem, right?
The, the traditional problem is we've run out of performance before we've run out
of app space, right? Um, and flash technology in a lot of ways inverts it, right? We, we
actually, uh, can run out of space before we run out of performance and to my mind that's,
uh, it's, uh, a far better situation to be in, um, because uh, you know, it's, it's
relatively easily to add space, it's not, and it's never been as easy to add performance.
Dave: So, so Duke when, when think about cloud storage we oftentimes think about, um, object
storage or we think about files, um, where's, where's block-based storage and applications
that run on block-based storage fit in the cloud?
Duke: Well, it, it, it fits in a number of different ways. Um, first of all, it blocks
origins behind a lot of the, um, cloud infrastructures that are out there in a, in a couple of different
ways. Um, either behind [inaudible 00:04:45], so it's, it's very important from a platform
perspective but also a secondary storage of, and our customers use them quite a bit as,
uh, um, uh, a way to have, um, detached storage so they can move from cloud server to cloud
server as well. Dave: So David, um, when you started Solid
Fire, uh, drawing on your experiences on Rackspace I presume you weren't trying to solve the
problem of archiving and back up. David: No, not, not really, you know, I, I
... what I really saw is that there were, there were a number of smart companies that
were focused on the backup and archival piece of cloud storage guys like Novonics and Scality
and, uh, other guys that were building this large scale capacity oriented storage systems
but really there wasn't anybody that was focused on high performance primary storage,
uh, that area there just was a lot of legacy enterprise hardware and there wasn't much,
uh, innovation, there wasn't much new stuff coming into that space and even the places
where flash was being introduced, it wasn't being done in a way that was really appropriate
for the cloud, Uh, and I really thought that that there was a new approach that was needed,
there was different focus on how to use flash, um, can I just make the system faster because
it's, anybody can put flash in a box and get a lot of performance, uh, but to really
focus on the ability to, to guarantee quality of service, to guarantee, uh, SLAs around
performance, storage, uh, availability, things like that, um, flash could be a component
of that solution but there's really a lot more technology needed to be built around
that and, and that was really what we did with Solid Fire.
Dace: So the, you know, like the, um, the good news is a lot of investment going on
in this area, uh, there's a lot of competition, and that's a good thing in a way because
it says you might have a good idea. Um, but at the same time there's a lot of competition.
So you specifically, uh, has, have taken your company and targeted the cloud service provider
marketplace. David: Right.
Dave: Exclusively, right, at least initially? David: Yeah.
Dave: Talk about why? David: Uh, you know I think there are couple
of reasons when we decided to, to do that. Certainly, my background and my experience
is there, uh, understanding of the market was, uh, a big reason to do that. Um, but
we also felt that it was, uh, you know, as I mentioned earlier, that was getting as much
attention from either the startups or, or the big companies. There was a, there was
a big hole that, uh, that we needed to fill and, uh, there's a lot of other great flash
storage companies, flash storage startups out there that are targeting other spaces
and filling other needs. Uh, but this is really the, the area that we thought, um, was a huge
opportunity both now and, and based on the growth of the cloud. Uh, it's going to be
a huge market in years to come. Dave: And, and, and Virtue's Stream and
SoftLayer, storage is not your business. I mean, uh, you know you mentioned, Dave you
mentioned Novonics, so they're a cloud service provider but it's, that's all they do,
storage? David: Mm-hmm.
Dave: Storage is not the only thing you guys do and you're selling all, all types of
different services but, but, but where storage fit in the, in the, in the, in the priority
pie or the, or the, the problem pie, why don't you ...
Matt: Storage, storage is has always been, uh, from visualize infrastructures of a few
years ago up to the, to the modern cloud service provider. Storage has always been probably
the most difficult problematic area of any infrastructure. Um, so, and our business is
about providing the compute, the, the horsepower for our customers to run, to run their applications,
their enterprise applications and that's, that's not only CPU and memory and, and
network IO, that's disk IO and disk performance and ability to store the data. So storage
is a huge part of it, uh, of, of, of our designed considerations but our business is providing
the horsepower. Dave: And you would agree with that Duke or?
Duke: Yeah, absolutely. Dave: Do you have anything to add?
Duke: Yeah, I, I, well, you know, I mean there's ... computer is nothing without either storage
and a network to get to it, um, so it's ... our, our ability to solve compute power
in the servers is only as good as our ability to, to solve the, the rest of the infrastructure,
their customer's need and, um, as , uh, as he said storage has always been one of
the unsolvable problems, you can only do as much as physics will allow on a spinning disk.
Um, SSDs and, you know what, what a lot of these two guys were doing is they're not
just, uh, throwing flash at it but they're, they're really step back and they're,
they're taking advantage of the compute power that's available today as well and
rearchitecting the whole way to build an [inaudible 00:09:02] which, in his hand which is, which
is what's really exciting to us is it's not just putting SSD into a sound, they really
reworked the whole way the thing operates. Dave: What does that mean for, um, your ability
to develop offerings? Uh, do, do you feel like it, um, cut your cost of delivering quality
of service or is it more than that? Does it allow you to go after a bigger market?
Duke: I, I think it's much more than our ability to cut cost. We're not, obviously
we always like to be able to, uh, to lower expenses and lower our cost for our customers
but this is really much more about, um, being able to, um, enable our customers in a way
that we haven't been able to before. So it's, it's really about offering new solutions
not just lowering the cost of existing solutions. Matt: I, I agree a 100%. It allows us to complement
our quality of service which runs to our infrastructure. It, it, it really compliments our, our ability
to provide those guaranties in our SLAs, uh, of our, of our infrastructure. Uh, it just,
it ties very nicely into our ability to do that and it allows us to do it in a very,
uh, a very cost effective manner but it allows us to expand the scope of our services and
start looking at new ways to drive innovation and services and, uh, and really drive value
for our customers. Dave: Uh, so David Wright I want to ask you,
um, startup , you know, we know startups are faster, they're more nimble, uh, they, they
focus like a laser on a problem, uh, hopefully they fly, fly, you know fly under the radar
for a period of time. But you're going after some big whales in a way. I mean, what you're
doing is very disruptive. So talk a little bit about, um, the lead that you feel you
have, how, how confident you are in that lead, uh, and, um, just add some color there if
you could. David: Yeah, you know obviously, we're very
proud of the technology. We're very proud of the architecture that we've built, um,
you know, we think we've got some really unique IP behind that, some really unique
architecture that, you know, like I say is more than just about putting SSD in a box.
Um, the challenge that I think a lot of the, uh, the legacy storage providers have is SSD
is so fast, it streams every aspect of the storage system that control architectures,
the processor architectures, the network, uh, bottlenecks are very different. And you
need a different approach to be able to harness all of that power not just to deliver the
performance that flash has but then do interesting things with it, do things like the data efficiency,
the compression, the duplication, the quality of service, and we really feel the only way
to do that is with a true scale at architecture, an architecture that allows you as you add
more capacity to get more CPU, more memory, more network, more processing power to bring
to bear to deliver all of that performance and so we really think that's one of the
big advantage that we have. We're really the first scale at architecture
that has been built for and ground up around flash. Um, well, certainly flash can be retrofitted
and bolted on to existing solutions, you're just not going to be able to get the full
benefit that it can, uh, you can derive from it and you're certainly not going to be
able to drive the cost efficiencies from technologies like do duplication and compression while
still getting that flash performance un, unless you've designed your system around that.
Dave: Yeah, and you're going to have to prove it of course because the big guys are
going to say, you know, they're going to go to you and say, "We'll have the in
18 months or whatever, nine months. In nine months we're going to have everything that
these guys have." And it might be 18 or 24 months and they have it but they'll freeze
the market and then do all those things. So you got to have the prove points.
David: Yup. Dave: That's why it's interesting to see
SoftLayer and Virtue's Stream, you guys are ... I mean, I don't know, the big whale
comes in and says that to you, what's your reaction? Okay, well wait, or?
Matt: You know, uh, it, well ... Dave: I mean, there's, there's risk, you
know. Matt: Well, there's, there's absolutely
is risk, right, and we obviously weigh risk versus benefit. Uh, but you know 18, 18 months,
9 months, in the world of IT in this, this market, uh, uh, that's like you know dinosaurs
to modern man. Dave: It's like a lifetime, yeah.
Matt: It moves so fast, it ... you have to take advantage of the technology and if it's
the right technology and that pans out and, and, and the risk, the risk cost benefit is
there you got to move on them. Dave: If I , if I would put you in a camp,
you know the camper would take the risk with the startup to get that value and get to market
faster and manage those risk, you know, you got risk management systems and, and, and
... Matt: It, it's, it's definitely what we
look at right? Dave: And, and ways to do that, that's what
you do that's what, that's what young companies that are aggressive, smart do.
Matt: Exactly, you have to be aggressive if you want to become a big company,
Dave: We love the discussion [laughs]. David: Right.
Dave: Good, excellent. All right, well, thanks very much guys for coming on the cube and
give us uh, uh, a deeper, uh, a detailed overview of, you know, your storage challenges, Dave
Wright good luck. David: Thank you.
Dave: With Sold Fire and, uh, I appreciate you guys coming on.
Matt: Yup, thank you Duke: Thank you.
Dave: All right.