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Enterprise Needs Driving Cloud Sales Boom
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The cloud continues to gain major ground, driven by enterprise storage needs.
Sales are way up for little-known manufacturers that sell directly to big cloud companies like Google and Facebook, while the market for traditional external storage systems is shrinking, according to research company IDC.
Internet giants and service providers typically don’t use specialized storage platforms in their sprawling data centers. Instead, they buy vast amounts of capacity in the form of generic hardware that’s controlled by software. As users flock to cloud-based services, that’s a growing business.
Revenue for original design manufacturers that sell directly to hyperscale data-center operators grew by 25.8 percent to more than US$1 billion in the second quarter, according to the latest global IDC report on enterprise storage systems. Overall industry revenue rose just 2.1 percent from last year’s second quarter, reaching $8.8 billion.
These so-called ODMs are low-profile vendors, many of them based in Taiwan, that do a lot of their business manufacturing hardware that’s sold under better known brand names. Examples include Quanta Computer and Wistron.
General enterprises aren’t buying many systems from these vendors, but the trends at work in hyperscale deployments are growing across the industry. Increasingly, the platform of choice for storage is a standard x86 server dedicated to storing data, according to IDC analyst Eric Sheppard. Sales of server-based storage rose 10 percent in the quarter to reach $2.1 billion.
Traditional external systems like SANs (storage area networks) are still the biggest part of the enterprise storage business, logging $5.7 billion in revenue for the quarter. But sales in this segment were down 3.9 percent.
Overall demand for storage capacity continued to grow strongly, with 37 percent more capacity shipped in the quarter compared with a year earlier.
Source-http://www.thegurureview.net/aroundnet-category/enterprise-storage-needs-driving-cloud-sales-boom.html
Does The Cloud Need To Standardize?
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Frank Baitman, the CIO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), was at the Amazon Web Services conference praising the company’s services. Baitman’s lecture was on the verge of becoming a long infomercial, when he stepped back and changed direction.
Baitman has reason to speak well of Amazon. As the big government system integrators slept, Amazon rushed in with its cloud model and began selling its services to federal agencies. HHS and Amazon worked together in a real sense.
The agency helped Amazon get an all-important security certification best known by its acronym, FedRAMP, while Amazon moved its health data to the cloud. It was the first large cloud vendor to get this security certification.
“[Amazon] gives us the scalability that we need for health data,” said Baitman.
But then he said that while it would “make things simpler and nicer” to work with Amazon, since they did the groundwork to get Amazon federal authorizations, “we also believe that there are different reasons to go with different vendors.”
Baitman said that HHS will be working with other vendors as it has with Amazon.
“We recognize different solutions are needed for different problems,” said Baitman. “Ultimately we would love to have a competitive environment that brings best value to the taxpayer and keeps vendors innovating.”
To accomplish this, HHS plans to implement a cloud broker model, an intermediary process that can help government entities identify the best cloud approach for a particular workload. That means being able to compare different price points, terms of service and service-level agreements.
To make comparisons possible, Baitman said the vendors will have to “standardize in those areas that we evaluate cloud on.”
The Amazon conference had about 2,500 registered to attend, and judging from the size of the crowd it certainly appeared to have that many at the Washington Convention Center. It was a leap in attendance. In 2012, attendance at Amazon’s government conference was about 900; in 2011, 300 attended; and in 2010, just 50, Teresa Carlson, vice president of worldwide public sector at Amazon, said in an interview.