Re: Means little
Hi Jeremiah,
As someone who, in a previous life, spent time in SPs (Acxiom) and large enterprises (Halliburton, United Airlines) I can tell you that balance is absolutely required in large shops.
Maybe that's the disconnect. I'm thinking of the potential in multi-PB or even EB deployments.
Most large SPs want capacity and performance tier differentiation, not just performance QoS and the ability to provision via an API.
For example, they will charge a lot less for NL-SAS hybrid capacity than SSD-based capacity, partly because it costs them less in the first place, partly because customers expect it to cost less.
They also have needs for different kinds of density for different kinds of data.
The $/GB to store something on 10TB low cost spinning disk are a tiny fraction of the costs of storing it in mirrored SSD.
This means that Service Providers naturally tend to have a variety of tiers instead of just one. Unless they're very very small, in which case a single box is enough. But then again those very small SPs also tend to be very cost-conscious.
SolidFire has had some success in that industry but the large Service Providers typically have much more than SolidFire. If anything, the percentage of capacity in the typical SP will be less SSD and much more of other stuff, as much as we'd all like that to not be the case :)
And finally, the overall number of SolidFire customers is very small.
Percentage-wise many of those customers may be Service Providers, but that doesn't mean significant penetration in that space.
D out.