Over at Scalablilty.com, Joe Landman writes that “As-A-Service” (AAS) models do a good job of lowering up-front costs, there is are a number of other factors to consider when looking at Cloud HPC.
One of the more painful aspects to the AAS models are customer experiences. We’ve got lots of customers whom are interested in high performance on their systems (or they wouldn’t be talking to us). Many start out telling us how some other system is better performance (at least on paper). And a few months down the road of using it, they realize it really isn’t better performance. Its much worse. We’ve had customers try this on various cloud vendor’s gear, telling us how much better it was, then come back later and say “lets build a private cloud.” Fads suck. They waste time/effort/resources. They slow projects down. Unfortunately, fads are hype magnets. HPC as a service is not a fad. But with all the hype around AAS models, its pretty close to being tarnished by similar failures.
Read the Full Story.