CloudSigma Unfurls All-SSD Public Cloud

Eight Private Cloud Myths Debunked

Given the fact that competition between one cloud provider and another basically comes down to performance, it’s only natural for cloud service providers to be heavily investing in solid-state drive (SSD) technology. What may prove surprising is to what extent.

CloudSigma today announced that it is rolling out a public cloud computing service that is now based primarily of SSD drives. According to CloudSigma COO Bernino Lind, the company will not only deliver a cloud service that outperforms rival offerings that are based on hard disk drives, it will do so at price points that are competitive with Amazon Web Services.

Lind says CloudSigma can do this because SSD technology allows CloudSigma to be more efficient in terms of how data is managed. With production applications running on SSDs, the company can make use of lower-cost storage to more efficiently compress data on hard drives for archival purposes. The end result is that the total cost of managing the cloud environment is lower, which allows CloudSigma to pass those costs on to the customer.

From a service-level agreement perspective, Lind says that SSD technology also makes it easier for CloudSigma to now guarantee application performance levels, which is something that public cloud service providers as a whole have shied away from actually doing.

In the months ahead, most cloud service providers will be relying primarily of higher-performance SSD technology to drive application performance. The only real question is at what rate they can afford to make the transition given some of the massive investments many of them have made in hard disk systems that are currently being used as primary storage systems.

In the meantime, IT organizations might want to start asking their cloud service providers exactly what kind of infrastructure their applications are going to be running on before committing to using that particular service.