I am going to invoke two James Governor definers and say the new AT&T and EMC storage offerings don’t qualify as clouds.
- I could not find pricing anywhere. Even registered on the AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service site. So, did not qualify on James’ 3rd rule – cannot use my credit card.
- I scanned at least 10 articles and blogs – none of them had pricing data. In the process, it violated James’ rule 7 – could not provision in less than 10 minutes.
I did get some clues from a blog Chuck Hollis of EMC writes.
First, he says a service “has to be cheaper or easier than doing it yourself”. Comparing against “doing it yourself” is laughable – as I pointed out here internal (or outsourced today to an IBM or EDS) Tier 1 storage can have a TCO in excess of $ 30 a gb a year. I would say it has to be competitive with an amazon, Nirvanix or other cloud pioneers – around $ 3 to 5 a gb a year.
Second, he takes sides away from providers like amazon and Nirvanix “So, when people ask me about newer-style storage cloud providers (Amazon as an example) being viable in the marketplace long term, I just have to point to all the inherent structural advantages favoring the telcos and service providers in this market.”
Be nice to see what we have to pay for that “structural advantage”
