One of the more unappreciated aspects of cloud computing is how quickly costs can spiral out of control. Not only do services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) charge by the hour for compute resources, access to their networks can be prohibitively expensive.
To help rein in those costs, Silver Peak System this week announced that it is making its wide area network (WAN) optimization software that runs on top of a virtual machine available on AWC in collaboration with Amazon.
Top 10 Reasons Why You Need a Better Network to the Cloud
The Virtual Acceleration Open Architecture (VXOA) software developed by Silver Peak is a software-only approach to WAN Optimization that can eliminate as much as 50 percent of the network traffic emanating from an AWS data center.
According to Silver Peak Systems CEO Rick Tinsley, Silver Peak needed to do some relatively minor adjustments to VXOA to make it fully compatible with the variant of the Xen virtual machine software that Amazon uses in AWS.
More importantly, Tinsley says the alliance with Amazon in the age of the cloud validates the rise of WAN optimization technologies between data centers, rather than merely being used between data centers and remote offices.
Most organizations initially moved to the cloud to reduce costs. But that goal has proven elusive. There’s no doubt cloud computing provides a more agile IT environment. But as cloud computing technologies evolve, we may soon see the actual total cost of cloud computing starting to fall in line with initial expectations.
