Carter George. The OTHER SaaS: Storage-as-a-Service

Cloud Computing Conference - Cloud Slam 2009.
Cloud storage is one of the fastest-growing segments in the storage industry due to its potential for lowering costs, removing the burden of managing and protecting data, and ultimately creating a new “virtual” tier of online storage. It has given rise to multiple innovative architectures, and could well be a harbinger of larger nearline storage trends. In this talk, we'll look at cloud storage architecture across multiple cloud providers, offering a detailed look at the architectural trends and innovations in cloud storage platforms, discussing how the various architectures differ from what end users have in their own data centers. We will also discuss the rise of some of the biggest breakthroughs in cloud storage, integrated content-aware compression and dedupe, which are ways of drastically reducing the space taken to store data, and also to move it across the WAN. The cloud offerings we will take a look at will be from Amazon AWS, Nirvanix, Microsoft, IBM, EMC and others.

Some take-aways include:
- A thorough introduction to the newest architecture innovations and features in cloud storage, helping participants make better informed business decisions regarding the most appropriate types of storage in the cloud for their specific needs.
- For cloud storage vendors and those in related businesses, an understanding of the emerging potential of dedupe and content aware compression in the cloud and how these can enable vendors to offer even more aggressive and compelling pricing to cloud storage customers, as well as to leverage finding duplicate and redundant data across much larger pools of data.
- New insights on ways that each vendor is, or could be, offering integrated data reduction as part of their overall value proposition to customers interested in cloud storage options.

Bio:
Carter George owns the product roadmap, product strategy and target market selection.
Prior to Ocarina, George was VP and co-founder of PolyServe. He drove product strategy, helped raise funding, defined product roadmap and early release schedules and helped close customers prior to the sale of Polyserve to Hewlett Packard. George played many roles including VP of Business Development where he closed several OEM deals with HP and Novell. He was also the VP and GM of Polyserve's scalable fault tolerant NAS storage division and was responsible for finding paths to market , managing OEMs, marketing ecosystem partnerships, and the P&L for the business.
Prior to PolyServe, George was at Sequent Computer. He was the Chief Enterprise Architect for Sequent and led a team focused on large deals in major accounts. He also ran Professional Services for Sequent and grew their consulting business from scratch to $100M rapidly. George also ran M&A for Sequent and orchestrated several strategic deals with Dell, IBM and others prior to the acquisition of Sequent by IBM for ~$1Billion.

Video of the session: