There is no denying that in the data storage and services industry, “The Cloud” is one of the hottest tickets on the market right now. However, simply signing up for an account with Amazon S3 is only the first step. Unless you have a extensive engineering team lying around with nothing to do, you have to buy something else to access the cloud.
The consumer cloud space is becoming noticeably crowded as of late, with both providers and application vendors trying to make their mark. Until the dust settles, which is likely years from now, there will be no common interface which will spring up out of the weeds. It will be awhile before most major operating systems adopt one uniform interface for out of the box support.
Enter Independent Software Vendors (ISVs.) The Cloud provides ISVs the opportunity to add value to cloud providers’ products. Take, for example, AT&T’s Synaptic Storage. AT&T allows customers to sign up for an account and then gives them documentation on how to build an application using EMC’s Atmos API. For an IT Administrator, there may not be the time, resources or even the technical ability to do so. Therefore, the Admin may go looking for software which can help the company access that cloud with minimal investment in time, resources and above all, money.
This is where ISVs add the most value. The ISV takes the time to integrate with the provider’s API, keeps it updated with the latest features and functionality that the cloud provider presents, and even has the ability to add additional value along the way (see next section). These are tasks not easily accomplished by a customer.
In the case of adding additional value, look at the example with AT&T. Synaptic allows customers to provide them with a special metadata flag indicating how they want this particular file (or object) to be stored. In the less expensive case, the file is stored with two copies on one site. For more availability, where the guarantee of AT&T’s SLA increases, the file can be optionally stored with one additional copy, on a second physical site. The customer may have different business requirements for his data and doesn’t necessarily want to overpay for the extra availability on all of the data.
Therefore, a cloud gateway product from an ISV can give the customer the flexibility to specify which data should be classified as more important. The ISV could implement various interfaces, the simplest of which could be using different folders for the customer to put the data.
Given the variety of cloud providers out there, cloud consumers have their work cut out for them. Fortunately, there are software vendors looking out for their interests, and hopefully making a few bucks along the way!
- Adam Marcionek, Principal Engineer for Seven10
