Timely article in InformationWeek as cloud provider Nirvanix goes out of business about the scrutiny IaaS architectures will increasingly get
“The size of the pipes providers use to move data into and out of their cloud is an architectural decision, and Nirvanix had maximized the inflow of data with lesser provisioning for outflow. Nirvanix's architecture reflected the prejudices of its business. In the end, the third-party vendors hosting Nirvanix bailed customers out by making 10-Gbps cross-switch lines available or otherwise using their expertise to relocate customers to another provider.”
“IaaS vendors don't talk about their architecture in great detail, viewing it as a competitive advantage. But at the most fundamental level, infrastructure clouds have scale-out architectures, rather than the scale-up architectures favored by most enterprises. Cloud vendors add servers, network capacity and disks in regular increments, and their cloud management software automatically discovers and integrates the fresh physical resources. Those cloud resources are connected by straightforward Layer 3 networking, usually commodity 10-Gbps Ethernet switches.”
The article only focuses on Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure. As Oracle, HP and other IaaS services keep growing expect similar scrutiny around their clouds also.
