Speaker 1: And now, Silicon Angle TV and Wikibon.org present a focal spotlight.
Live from Las Vegas and Vmworld 2011 host John Ferer and Dave Vellante illuminating
new models for Cloud service providers with support from SolidFire.
Dave: Alright we’re back, this is Dave Vellante.
We’re live from VMworld 2011 Silicon Angle continuous coverage.
I’m Dave Vellante Wikibon.org and we’ve got two great guests here.
We’re going to talk about the Cloud services business, how that’s changing.
I’m here with Nathan Day who’s the chief scientist and Duke Skarda who’s the CTO
of SoftLayer.
Very interesting company; we want to hear more about it.
Welcome gentlemen.
Nathan: Thanks Dave.
Duke: Thank you.
Dave: So, start off.
Tell me a little bit about SoftLayer, who you guys are, history of the company.
Just take us through that.
Nathan: Sure.
So SoftLayer’s the infrastructure to the service company.
We exist mainly to give our customers the ability to get our infrastructure in the terms
of Cloud computing, regular computing, network appliances, things of that.
Trying to deliver self-provision, self-managed compute solutions that live in our data centers.
We started in 2006 and we’ve grown over the years.
We’ve got data centers now in Dallas, Seattle, Washington DC, San Jose and we’re actually
about to open a data center in Singapore and one in Amsterdam too!
Dave: So are you’re…
You compete with the big whale Cloud service providers or Amazon or yes?
Nathan: Absolutely.
You know, we provide a little different service than you find from Amazon or Rackspace.
We kind of fit in the middle of those two guys.
Amazon’s great at the virtual machine infrastructure service; Rackspace is great at the managed,
dedicated hosting.
We kind of fall in the middle where we have the virtualized services but we also the dedicated
services as well in a self-managed environment.
So we fit nicely in between those two extremes.
Dave: So you’re a relatively new company, what was the idea behind the company?
What was the sort of, secret sauce that you were trying to bring to the marketplace?
Duke: Yeah, well SoftLayer really began as an outgrowth of a number of people having
a lot of experience in the hosting industry and the secret sauce that I would say that
was really present from the beginning was automating everything and building on a generic
platform.
So all of our products and services are really based around the next 86 platform so we tried
to turn that into as many different products as we can from network appliances, Cloud appliances.
So all of our dedicated servers and our Cloud servers are really based on the same platform.
If you go thorough our data center, it’s rack after rack of x86 boxes that we can turn
into just about anything.
Dave: So, what we’re doing here at Vmworld is we have these, in the afternoons, these
in depth spotlights and you guys, we bring you on as subject matter experts and there’s
sponsored segments and we help our audience understand practitioner audience understand
the topic, the trends what’s happening.
And one of the things that we’ve talked about is, every IT shop that you talk to it’s,
budgets are flat, we have to do more with less.
Now I’m guessing that you’re business is not flat, it’s up and to the right, right?
Nathan: Exactly we’re a…
We’ve got great growth going on.
We solve the problems you’re addressing, basically turn compute into an operational
expense to a capital expense for a lot of people.
It’s been going great.
Dave: So the point of that discussion is that what we see is the Cloud service provider
is actually innovating, they’re investing, they’re growing faster than the average
Joe IT shop, the average bare IT shop and as a result; we think that the gap between
traditional IT and Cloud service providers actually may be widening.
But having said that, traditional IT, they got different challenges but they can learn
a lot from Cloud service providers.
So I want to go to school on you guys a little bit.
What did you see when you started the company and what do you see now as the Cloud evolution?
If I…
Everybody talks about the journey.
What is some of your journey and your vision that you see?
Duke: You know, I’d say when we first started the company and really dating back to the
early 2000’s, service providers that were really hosting companies at the time, really
offered up a dedicated server and it was at the time, very low-level, a lot of web services
very simplistic applications on the internet.
Over the last several years, a couple of things have really come together to make that a much
more powerful platform.
The internet itself is so much more robust over the last three years especially, to the
house, to our mobile platforms we have internet access everywhere and it’s very powerful.
You can get 30 megabits right down to your house.
We’re all carrying 3G and 4G platforms around with us.
That’s made access to a centralized platform so much more ubiquitous that things like Cloud
have really come into their own.
So one of the big changes that we’ve seen, that’s been brought about by that is the
desire to have a Cloud service.
And there’s a couple of different ways you can look at Cloud servers, Amazon has really
popularized the virtualized Cloud model.
We look at our dedicated model and we think of that as having been Cloud all along but
now what we’re trying to bring to the market is the ability to work with dedicated servers
in the way that we’ve all become accustomed to working with those virtualized servers
as well.
Dave: What does the infrastructure look like underneath?
I mean you’ve guys, I presume, didn’t have a ton of legacy infrastructure right?
A startup, so what’s it look like?
Nathan: We basically took [inaudible 0:05:53] server, wrote an automation orchestration
engine around it so we can take any [inaudible 0:05:58] server turn it into any product that…
In our catalogue.
And one thing that made SoftLayer different in the beginning was that we built out a dual
network for every server which actually transitioned to every Cloud virtual machine as well.
That allows our customers to eliminate the problem reserving racks for growth because
every server from SoftLayer is connected to each other via private network as well as
your traditional public basing network,.
And it gives our customers a lot of flexibility.
They don’t have to worry about cross connects; they can have servers in multiple data centers
behind multiple routers and they still have that back end connectivity that really allows
them to build a scalable application.
Dave: So here at Vmworld…
I remember my first Vmworld a few years ago, it hit me right in the face is storage is
like the biggest problem that all these practitioners face and Vmworld’s been working hard in
the ecosystem.
Where does storage fit in your challenge pain-in-the-neck pie?
Nathan: It’s pretty high up there.
Whether you’re talking about local attached, direct attached storage and someone trying
to do tricks with SSD’s to improve performance, putting in RAID cards, going with a memory
model [inaudible 0:07:04] Fusion IO.
Even local servers are still a huge storage challenges and then when you bring in the
network attached storage, the SAN storage; all kinds of new challenges present themselves.
The workloads are different, the ability to fetch small objects, it really…
It permeates every application out there because storage is turning into such a huge bottleneck;
not only in terms of capacity but also in terms of the actual performance.
Dave: Are you able to deliver consistent quality of service for your customers and actually
charge for it?
Is storage agate at doing that?
Talk about that a little bit.
Duke: Well, at the storage layer there’s a couple of…
As Nathan walked through, there’s a bunch of different options.
Each of those options has different levels of service that we can provide different quality
of service.
One of the things we’re excited about was some of the new products that are coming out
now; a lot of them based on SSD and flash is…
They’re sort of reinventing the way to build a SAN platform and one of the things that
they’re able to build in that we’re very excited about is the ability to control at
a fairly fine grain quality of service.
Today, IOPS are really mapped across all of the users of a given SAN, if we can begin
to control that then we can begin to charge for different levels of service and more importantly
we can guarantee different levels of service.
Dave: So we’ve been looking into this our…
David Floyer one of our analysts has studied this market very closely and he’s sort of
laid out the different approaches, the first one being sort of STEC drives, let’s say
in an EMC array as sort of supporting legacy systems and then at the top of the spectrum
if you will, you’ve got fusion IO serva class memory.
We’re starting to see these new all-flash arrays immerge and the value proposition behind
them is guaranteed quality of service.
We’ve done an analysis stacking up a high-bred SAN array with spinning disk and flash with
these all flash arrays we’ve found that the all flash and a lot of applications is
less expensive.
I’m trying to see if you can confirm that.
Are you seeing that potentially you can get greater utilization out of these devices or
do you not have enough experience with that yet?
Duke: I don’t think we have enough experience yet.
Right now, we like what we’re hearing.
I think the models that we’re hearing and the architectures that we’re seeing look
very promising.
We’re just now beginning to get our hands on these products so we should know soon.
Nathan: We really…
All these new products give us an opportunity to get another access to the product line
so instead of just talking about capacity we can talk about selling a quality of service
and a guaranteeing performance at certain levels.
That’s really exciting.
Dave: So how do you guarantee quality of service today?
You just got to throw more hardware at the problem?
Is that right?
Nathan: Absolutely, just got to put more hardware behind it.
Spindles.
Dave: And then you got to manage it.
Nathan: That’s right.
Dave: So that’s increases your cost.
Will you be able to, let’s assume that you’ll be able to sort of isolate quality of service
by customer, right?
That’s the nirvana I presume in your business.
Duke: That’s nirvana, yeah, that’d be great.
Dave: How do you charge?
Do you charge cost plus today?
Or can you sell the value of that if you can [inaudible 0:10:16]?
Duke: Absolutely, I believe we can sell the value of that idea.
The other thing we’d like to see is the ability to create very high-performance Cloud
products as well.
There’s high-performance Cloud products, so there’s the ability to sell SAN storage
as a service on top of our dedicated line as well as blended underneath a large number
of Cloud servers as well.
So we could have multiple levels of Cloud products as well.
Dave: Ok, so let’s sort of summarize what we talked about.
I mean you’ve got this Cloud of evolution going on; you’ve got flash as this huge
disrupter and if I understand it you guys are looking at flash as a way to actually
generate incremental revenue and drive value for your customers as well as potentially
lower cost.
Because right now if I understand it, you’re throwing hardware at the problem and I presume
that ripples through to management as well?
Management costs?
Nathan: Yeah, the ability to manage any storage environment is going to be critical to this.
You’re going to have to have the transparency to know what’s going on inside the storage
and you’re going to have to have the ability to account for that so your application can
perform at its best.
Dave: Do you feel like this will enable new applications?
I mean we think of…
You think of the Cloud and you think of applications like backup and archiving, CRM; do you see
flash architecture supporting new levels of applications?
Duke: Absolutely.
One of the biggest problems that public Clouds have is good storage access and the ability
to consistently supply the number of IOPS that our applications want, that our clients
are using.
So if we can do that, we can drive utilization up and the number of applications people can
put in there really goes up.
It opens up a lot of the…
A lot of opportunity.
Dave: So give us an example.
What kind of applications would you consider emerging that you can’t support that well
and guarantee the quality of service for a cost effective approach that you will be able
to enable in this new model?
Nathan: I think any application that considers itself social.
So any kind of social media, social gaming; those guys have an application that really
has to have rapid access to data and large quantities at the same time and right now
there’s a lot of gyrations going on, memcach, all kinds of technologies used to kind of
get around the problem but if you can get reliable fast storage you can make the problem
a lot simpler for these guys.
Dave: So if you had a put on your telescope, look to the future, what would you guess would
be your breakout between spinning disk and flash from a capacity standpoint?
Is it 10% flash?
5% flash?
50 % flash?
What do you think?
Duke: I think as far out as you go that number increases.
Whenever we introduce a new flash product today we can’t keep it on the shelf long
enough to sell…
To meet demands.
I think that will only be limited there by supply, I think.
Dave: Excellent.
Well listen, we’re out of time.
I appreciate you guys coming and talking a little bit about SoftLayer and sharing your
perspectives.
Good luck with the company and thanks for coming to the Cube.
Nathan: Thank you.
Duke: Thanks.
Dave: We’ll see you guys later.