Monday, August 8, 2011

Do we need "cloud brokers"?

I was at NEVMUG (The New England VMware Users Group) a few weeks ago (has it really been a few weeks???) and talking to several of the vendors there. Some I have known for years, like Actifio, Rutter, Dell, Mosaic and Riverbed and it's always nice to see old friends. A few I didn't know and it was great to see some of the new ideas people have.

One company is called TwinStrata. I probably can't do them justice but the "nugget of information" I picked up was they help you get your storage into the cloud, any cloud. They have a cache locally for performance reasons (kind of required for latency reasons) and connectors to rackspace storage, Amazon S3, Google storage etc.

The cool thing though is you can use their product to move between cloud providers too. So the question is, when or will we ever, need someone that brokers the best deals for us in cloud storage and then moves my data around dynamically. I'm thinking of the power model where National Grid (or Central Maine Power) provides distribution (like TwinStrata) and someone else provides the power. I can switch who I get power from to get the best rates and in fact we have a power broker that helps us with this. Do we need the same thing for storage? Will we for virtual computing too, once that's more open I guess.

Makes me wonder what tomorrow will bring...

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