The major storage manufacturers are all chasing the cloud storage market. The private cloud storage market makes a lot of sense to me. Clients adopting private cloud methodologies have additional, often more advanced, storage requirements. This will frequently require a storage rearchitecture and may dictate changing storage platforms to meet the new requirements. The public cloud storage market outlook is much less clear to me.

If public cloud services are as successful as the analysts, media, and vendors are suggesting they will be, then cloud providers will become massive storage buyers at a scale that dwarfs today’s corporate consumers. Whether the public cloud storage is part of an overall architecture that includes compute and capacity or a pure storage solution, the issue is the same. This is not about 1 or 2PB. The large cloud providers could easily be orders of magnitude larger than that.

Huge storage consumers are exactly what the storage manufacturers are looking for, right? Let me suggest something that may sound counterintuitive. Enormous success of cloud providers will be terrible news for today’s mainstream storage manufacturers. Read more…

I will be participating in a panel discussion at the Cloud Computing Expo in New York on Wednesday (4/2). The topic is “How and Why is a Flexible IT Infrastructure the Key To the Future?” Please stop by and say hello if you are at the show.