The IaaS Rush
July 17, 2012
The IaaS Rush
Why is everybody getting into the IaaS business? For a long time, it was only Amazon, then Rackspace, Savvis etc followed but there were no new significant players for a long time. However, most recently, IaaS has been really hot; the new entrants into this space are Google, Microsoft and HP. While Amazon, Rackspace, Savvis have predominantly been operating in the IaaS space, Google was more of a PaaS and SaaS player. It did a little bit on the IaaS side with Google drive but nothing to the extent of Amazon S3. Microsoft was also a platform player with Azure, but recently introduced an IaaS offering into Azure. For HP, it was a brand new entry into the Cloud Space. While I am not sure about what technology Google is using to power its IaaS (should most probably be something based on Xen or KVM), HP’s IaaS management layer is run on OpenStack with probably Xen as the Virtualization layer.
One of the Forrester reports (Sizing the Cloud, April 2011) suggests that by 2020, the IaaS market including both the Public and Managed Private Clouds will reach about $30 Billion. A report by Parallels suggests that the global IaaS market for SME’s will be close to $27 B in 2014. These numbers do look small in comparison to the overall Cloud market with SaaS, but is still a big number.
Is this trend only limited to the large players or is it common even with in Tier2 or Tier 3 players. In India, TCL launched InstaCompute a few quarters ago. I know that Sify is also planning to launch their IaaS service soon. From my visits to Hosting Provider prospects around India, I know that almost everybody is looking at launching an IaaS offering in the form of Virtual Private Servers or VPS.
The rush into offering IaaS is now looking beginning to look like a trend. If there’s a trend then probably, there should be a demand that is driving this trend. Some of the possible reasons that could be driving this trend:
- Many SMBs are moving towards adding some kind of IT infrastructure to support their operations. Instead of deploying servers in house they are choosing to use hosted infrastructure
- While SaaS will remain the most popular and fastest growing of the Cloud services, it will never be able to replace the need for just servers with an OS for deploying custom or legacy applications
- One of the last steps in any Dev / Test environments is Scalability Testing or Compatibility testing across multiple OS platforms, using an IaaS is a boon addressing these needs
- Google, Microsoft wanted to complete the stack of services which they provide to the users
Well these are what I could think of, what do the readers think?
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About the Author
Giridhar Lakkavalli has worked in the IT industry for more than 18 years. He is currently the head of VMUnify – a solution that helps organizations build Trusted Virtual Datacenters and Unified Clouds. His areas of interest include Virtualisation, File Systems, Data Protection, Operating Systems and Entrepreneurship. He is also an author of two patent pending applications. He can be reached at Giridhar_lv@mindtree.com.