Jon Greaves’ Blog

This week I spent some time discussing our strategy with several analysts – really in-depth conversations on how Carpathia has a different strategy when it comes to “cloud” vs. many of our competitors.  While different to our competitors, our cloud strategy builds on our core competency of running IT infrastructure.  Where we differ is we do not see managed and cloud as mutually exclusive - in fact, it’s just the opposite -  two living in harmony within the same customer solution.

One of the ways we differ from others in the hosting industry is something we call the Carpathia Services Platform, or CSP.  Many of us “Carpathians” cut our teeth in the telecommunications industry then moved to Managed Service Providers.  So it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone when we describe CSP and developed its capabilities we used a lot of proven telco tools and techniques to create our delivery platform.  We talk about operational support systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS), a service tier which gives us an abstract layer to deliver innovative services on-top of the same underlying platform.  In fact we even use Erlang’s to describe the utilization and subscription characteristics of our cloud compute platform.  At the end of the day, managing a finite set of resources (compute, storage and bandwidth) for a large number of customers is really no different than figuring out how many call minutes can be squeezed through a T1 circuit.

A unified storage tier is a key tenant to any such strategy.  We look to optimize our storage solutions based on a number of parameters; cost, performance, availability, dispersion, etc.  The building blocks in this strategy are SAN, NAS, and now Cloud Storage solutions - each meeting a set of customer requirements while all being delivered as an easy-to-consume resource.

This week one of our partners, Parascale goes GA with a cloud storage solution.  We have worked very closely with their team over the last 6 months, integrating the ParaScale solution into the CSP.  At a high level, Parascale provides CSP with two key capabilities:

1. Cloud based storage solution.  Parascale quickly allows you to assemble petabyte scale storage clouds from a cluster of unbalanced machines.  Behind the scenes, Parascale is an object-based store, but provides a thin virtual file-system layer allowing customers to gain access to the storage in a very familiar way; use it as a file-system vs. re-coding applications.
2. Cloud storage “bus”.  We also use Parascale inside the CSP to create a storage bus allowing us to integrate dedicated/managed servers with our cloud solutions.  This is a key tenant for our cloud-bursting solution we call InstantOn

Congrats to the team at Parascale.  We will be talking more specifically about how CSP has helped customers in coming blog posts.