A Bird on the Plate is Worth Two in the Cloud

There is a report today which amounts to a small, tiny, fledgling crow. Yummy, lightly saute'd with a good chianti.

It is a discussion of Clouding with SSD. As I have talked about here, I never expected Clouding to go SSD, just because the allure of Cloud is cheap and dirty. SSD is neither of those. Although, the justification given in the article is not the nirvana I have discussed, BCNF databases, but simple brute force speed with existing bloated data.

The discussion is also not a vindication of STEC, the loudest (well in some parts of the world, anyway) proponent. In fact, they talk about PCIe form factor, and that is in the wheelhouse of Fusion-io. My suspicion that the distributed machine with attached SSD in the PCIe slot will be at least as important as massive arrays of the EMC/IBM/Sun style looks to be getting stronger. Of course, it too could end up being a bit feathery in a few months.

The nature of the discussion is in terms, not of open Clouds (Amazon, et al), but of MySpace and the like. In other words, providers of Cloudy stuff to their own users. Who happen to want to store their data off-site. To me, that isn't quite what Cloud means, but redefining words to fit reality is characteristic.

I guess you can't have everything, but it does amount to a foot in the door. In time, the smart database folks will see the opportunity to have their cake and eat it too: SSD serving BCNF data will always be faster than serving the un-normalized stuff.

Another couple of steps forward.