This post is part of our Cloud Market Views series where we were reporting from the floor at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas.
The one thing we miss about AT&T were those rollover minutes. The idea that even though we had 1400 minutes one month and we didn’t use them all, the leftover minutes would roll into the next month and we’d get to use them then. Still, we always overallocated for what we needed. We never went over and we ended up paying for minutes we never used. It was a good try by AT&T, but we still ended up paying the same as we do with Verizon. We’d like to just pay for what we actually use.
Paying for what you use rather than what you allocate is the thinking behind Virtustream’s virtualization offering which boils down the virtual environment into a single “infrastructure unit.” Virtustream’s virtual sub-particle is a combination of compute, RAM, embedded network bandwidth, and embedded storage IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second). By breaking it down to such a granular level, they’re essentially able to virtualize a VM, explained Rodney Rogers, Chairman & CEO of Virtustream.
Virtustream uses their resource pooling IP in their own cloud OS management layer to control that “infrastructure unit.” That in turn allows them to aggregate and read their clients’ consumption across all of their workload requirements. Unlike competitors who bill on what they’re allocated to consume, “We bill our clients on what they actually consume,” said Rogers.
Utilizing the “infrastructure unit” architecture, Virtustream can size and price efficiently for the Web 2.0 marketplace and for the enterprise where they can control IOPS in a multi-hypervisor environment (ESX for VMware-based solutions and KVM for open source-based solutions) which allows them to guarantee SLAs for items such as response time and throughput, said Rogers. That’s critical for running a heavyweight legacy back office enterprise application in the cloud.
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