One of my favorite William Gibson quotes is “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”.  That statement could easily be applied to the work Gabriel Long is doing on behalf of his employer.

Here’s the story in a nutshell: he’s built a serious VSAN cluster that uses Diablo’s Memory Channel Storage™  technology for flash storage, which means he’s well ahead of the pack.  No, it’s not officially supported yet.  Regardless, very impressive stuff — and a great example of hyperconverged architectures to come.

Gabriel (or Gabe as he prefers) was kind enough to speak to me about what he’s doing: the motivations, the thinking and the experience that resulted.  It was an amazing story.

I hope you’ll agree as well …
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Do you remember your high school years–of calculating the boiling point of isopropyl alcohol in chemistry or studying the impact of supply and demand on the costs of goods in economics class? Many of us wondered, “When will we ever use these principles in real life?” For those of us hoping to enter into the booming Software Defined Storage (SDS) space, the answer is now. With the demand for storage continuing to expand at over 40% annual growth until 2018,* it’s a safe bet that we aren’t the only ones that see the growth possibilities in storage as a service–nor are we the only ones who plan to expand their business model to include SDS.

So, how do you develop the perfect go-to-market strategy?

As global Product Marketing Leader for the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) solutions at VMware, I’ve dedicated my career to crafting and executing winning strategies for market entry and growth. And, I’ve learned a few things along the way. At the top of the list is the importance of first impressions and taking the time to create a strategy that differentiates your company from the competition. It all starts with doing your homework – studying the trends, crunching the numbers, learning from your mistakes and coming out stronger in the end.

I recently spoke with one of our independent cloud services providers, IndonesianCloud. Their story is the epitome of how to capture attention across the aggressive cloud market. In 2011, they focused their sights on becoming the most trusted, most reliable and most secure CSP in Indonesia. For those of you who don’t know, Indonesia is a country with 254 million people, and literally millions of companies, and it is currently adopting cloud at a staggering rate. It is estimated that the cloud spend will reach $1.2 billion by 2017–and that’s just across Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) business. Needless to say, it’s a great time to be a CSP in Indonesia.

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