> Feels like most of this could have been solved by either hiring storage industry experts or just acquiring one of the major vendors.
VMware tried something like that with vCloud Air [0], which attempted to build a public cloud on the ESXi hypervisor with hardware and expertise sourced from storage vendors. It failed.
There were a number of reasons for the failure but perhaps the most prominent was that VMware vastly underestimated the amount of engineering necessary to build a multi-tenant public cloud. As the article pointed out you need to optimize along the entire I/O path from client request down to sectors on disk. It's a significant mindshift from running VMs over a SAN, which is where VMware came from.
(I was involved in the project in its later stages. These are personal observations.)
VMware tried something like that with vCloud Air [0], which attempted to build a public cloud on the ESXi hypervisor with hardware and expertise sourced from storage vendors. It failed.
There were a number of reasons for the failure but perhaps the most prominent was that VMware vastly underestimated the amount of engineering necessary to build a multi-tenant public cloud. As the article pointed out you need to optimize along the entire I/O path from client request down to sectors on disk. It's a significant mindshift from running VMs over a SAN, which is where VMware came from.
(I was involved in the project in its later stages. These are personal observations.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCloud_Air