GigaOM Research expects the cloud computing market will grow from $70.1 billion in 2012 to $158.8 billion in 2014. With such expansion, cloud service providers must find ways to provide increasingly sustainable performance. At the same time, they must accommodate a growing number of internet users, whose expectations about improved and consistent response times are expanding.
However, service providers cannot boost performance if the corresponding cost also rises.
Cheap, high I/O performance and control is the holy grail for Cloud providers. CPU performance of a great percentage of cloud workloads is more than satisfactory. It's being able to guarantee I/O performance to a cloud application. This seems to be one of the most uneven areas of performance for cloud providers. InfiniBand alone is throwing more bandwidth at a management issue.
My thinking is that this is a great area for data center based software defined networking. Cloud providers seem like the perfect environment for a converged network managed by a distributed software layer.
Doubt I'd be able to listen to the round table but it's a extremely interesting topic.
