Just recently, I wrote a note on What does cloud native mean. Very recently, we lived through the power of “cloud elasticity,” and I wanted to share that with you.
But let’s start with a walk down memory lane. It was 2011, EMC had just acquired Isilon, and the business was growing like a weed. One of the sales teams had sold a large OneFS cluster to a “VERY LARGE CUSTOMER.”
The first I heard about it was in the context of an escalation. This “VERY LARGE CUSTOMER” was unhappy with “performance,” which made the Isilon account team unhappy and the EMC account team livid.
Thus, I found myself sitting in front of this customer, getting raked over hot coals. The problem: The team had sold the “wrong hardware product”; the wrong type of “node.” They had been sold a minivan when they needed a race car!
Twenty-four hours later, I was sitting in the office of this guy getting raked over hot coals (see this pattern here?) as the only solution was to get them new nodes at enormous cost to us and time for the customer.
The customer had an impacted workflow that lasted weeks as Isilon shipped out new nodes; they were racked, cabled and operationalized!
Pain, agony and waste all around!
During my sentence (err.. tenure) at EMC-Isilon, the above scenario was repeated over and over again. Sometimes, we mischaracterized the workflow, often the wrong product was sold, and frequently, the customer loved their Isilon cluster so much that they “tried to use their minivan like a race car”, crashed, and EMC-Isilon had to mount a rescue operation!
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago! We, at Qumulo, had a brand new customer workflow on our Azure Native Qumulo offering. Big customer and brand new workflow. What could possibly go wrong?
As their workflow ramped up, the customer’s user experience was, politely put, sub-optimal.
Within minutes of first contact with the customer, our awesome Customer Success team was all over the situation. Then the engineering team jumped in, and thanks to our secure, cloud-based, continuous, real-time monitoring (BTW, stay tuned for a November 9th announcement about major updates on this front too!) we were quickly able to see that we were CPU bound.
Not a problem; the team seamlessly, transparently, and on the fly updated the underlying Azure VM instances! Thanks for building a great offering Azure!
Problem solved! Happy customer, and no awkward conversations with this guy
That, folks, is cloud elasticity in action!
As a buyer of IT infrastructure, I am all about reducing our data center footprint and leveraging the cloud as much as possible. You should consider that too! And for your unstructured data workloads, Qumulo is there, no matter where you are!
