-by Ian Duncan

There’s a certain irony in writing a blog on what some people are calling ‘cloud storage’ whilst sitting on an Airbus at 34,000 feet looking down on a fluffy white vista… After spending the start of the week at SNW talking to journalists from EMEA and the US there’s clearly a lot of interest in how enterprises are dealing with explosive amounts of data. We have the privilege of talking to Snapfish on a regular basis so we understand how they plan and manage an infrastructure that needs to deal with extreme growth. Snapfish is adding a million customers a month but still manages to have a customer base that has a 90% recommendation rate (as in 90% of them have already recommended Snapfish) – that’s pretty darned impressive.

Our interactions with Web 2.0 customers (fundamentally anyone who delivers content or services via the web) point to three fundamental infrastructure tenets;

1 - The infrastructure has to scale – you have to be able to react to performance or capacity changes very rapidly.

2 - The infrastructure has to be able to be managed holistically – deploying 10PB systems is no mean feat – you need to be able to deploy and live with a system so easily that you’re able to plan for PB’s / Administrator.

3 – The economics of the infrastructure have to align with the business model. Can you imagine how fast YouTube or MySpace would have grown if you had to pay $10 a month (or even $1 a month) to access them? Free works (because you make the money up elsewhere) but you need very, very cheap storage to make the model work.

Here’s the kicker – you need all three, without exception, to make this work for these kinds of customer – scalable and easy to manage at $15 / GB doesn’t cut it and nor does a PB at $3/GB if you need an army of administrators to keep the system up and running…

There’s an opportunity here for system vendors to capitalize on this need – stay tuned for more from HP.

Ian Duncan

Director of Marketing, Scalable NAS