Maureen O'Gara's
recent Cloudonomics article says: "Citrix has pushed out a cloud
solution called Citrix C3 Lab so its
followers can use Amazon's EC2 and S3 as part of their standard
technology infrastructure and prototype cloud projects...This week it
added XenApp and XenDesktop so service providers can deliver Windows
applications and desktops as a service...C3 Lab is supposed to provide
an inexpensive, preconfigured
environment that starts with access to Citrix XenApp alongside key
Citrix C3 technologies such as Citrix Access Gateway and Citrix
Repeater."
From a service provider perspective, the real value from Citrix C3 is the XenServer - a server virtualization solution that allows customers to create truly virtual data center environments.Our partners at Softlayer are using it to run CloudLayer - along with Mezeo, of course.
But here's the gotcha: if you're an IT hosting service provider, you have no incentive to use Amazon's S3.
In fact, you want to use your own storage because storage remains a significant profit center. Why would a service provider want to give away their profit center to Amazon?
Thanks to all the media coverage that Amazon's Simple Storage Solution (S3) has received, there is a widely-held belief that the total cost of cloud storage is roughly "15 cents a GB/month."
This is a false assumption. What the 15 cents does not include is:
- Price for inbound bandwidth
- Price for outbound bandwidth
- Price for puts/gets
In other words,they rent you a shower for 15 cents, but if you want to use water, you need to pay more, oh! and also to turn on the faucet, and, of course, the soap is extra. So truly, the 15 cent is for the storage alone, not for the total service.
Let's take a look at what the actual market price is if you, as a service provider, want to provide Cloud Storage with API access as one of your offerings. Based on public information available on their websites, here are our estimates of the all-in price per GB charged by Amazon S3, Nirvanix SDN, and RackSpace CloudFiles to their customers:
As you can see, there is a significant margin opportunity in those prices, even if you offer cloud storage at prices well below the competition. And that's why, as a service provider, you'll want to provide your own storage services. There's a real profit model in storage, and giving it away to Amazon is not exactly a best practice.
From a service provider perspective, the real value from Citrix C3 is the XenServer - a server virtualization solution that allows customers to create truly virtual data center environments.Our partners at Softlayer are using it to run CloudLayer - along with Mezeo, of course.
But here's the gotcha: if you're an IT hosting service provider, you have no incentive to use Amazon's S3.
In fact, you want to use your own storage because storage remains a significant profit center. Why would a service provider want to give away their profit center to Amazon?
Thanks to all the media coverage that Amazon's Simple Storage Solution (S3) has received, there is a widely-held belief that the total cost of cloud storage is roughly "15 cents a GB/month."
This is a false assumption. What the 15 cents does not include is:
- Price for inbound bandwidth
- Price for outbound bandwidth
- Price for puts/gets
In other words,they rent you a shower for 15 cents, but if you want to use water, you need to pay more, oh! and also to turn on the faucet, and, of course, the soap is extra. So truly, the 15 cent is for the storage alone, not for the total service.
Let's take a look at what the actual market price is if you, as a service provider, want to provide Cloud Storage with API access as one of your offerings. Based on public information available on their websites, here are our estimates of the all-in price per GB charged by Amazon S3, Nirvanix SDN, and RackSpace CloudFiles to their customers:
As you can see, there is a significant margin opportunity in those prices, even if you offer cloud storage at prices well below the competition. And that's why, as a service provider, you'll want to provide your own storage services. There's a real profit model in storage, and giving it away to Amazon is not exactly a best practice.
The reasoning about owning your own cloud storage makes a lot of sense. For service providers looking for a clutered storage infrastructure on commodity server hardware similar to S3 and Nirvanix I suggest taking Caringo CAStor for a test drive. The CAStor software enables affordable clusters that scale from TBs to PBs in increments based on your business demands. There's a free download of the software for up to 4TB of licensed capacity. If you want to increase beyond that, it's as simple as buying an additional license and plugging a new server node into the cluster. Check it out at http://www.caringo.com