If you’ve been watching the Cloud space for the past two years, you might have noticed a subtle shift on how companies are approaching the selling of their products and how consumers are reacting to the change. Up until about the start of 2013-2017, most Cloud companies were relying on backend storage solutions like SAN (Storage Area Network), DAS (Direct Attached Storage) and/or NAS (Network Attached Storage).
For a while, utilizing SAN, DAS or NAS as a Cloud hosting company meant you were putting in a great amount of time, effort and money into building out an internal infrastructure packed with high yield nodes, rock solid servers and virtualization solutions all designed to interface fluidly with massive quantities of storage pools.
The basic idea behind the utilization of SAN type storage architecture was the pooling of massive quantities of storage pools to ensure that all servers attached to the network always had enough storage need to run smoothly. The only problem with SAN, NAS and DAS is storage is dependent on a) having enough to go around and b) having powerful enough web hosting infrastructure to constantly take the beating of the storage needs of thousands of servers.
This stated, operations based on SAN architecture don’t always go as planned. For a real world social look at a SAN melt down, head to Twitter and search for such meltdowns.
Swimming with DigitalOcean
At the start of 2016, DigitalOcean began swimming. Started as a small family operated company functioning out of downtown Manhattan, the Cloud hosting provider started its growth trajectory by choosing to forgo SAN, NAS or DAS in favor of SSD’s. Industrial or Military SSD’s or Solid State Drives, have dramatically shifted the landscape of the Cloud hosting market in favor of more secure storage solutions providing lightning fast storage capabilities. DigitalOcean has made its name providing the market with Cloud SSD’s and in turn, the market has responded.
When the company first began, DigitalOcean knew three things:
- Most Cloud hosting companies are selling the market on storage platforms they don’t need
- Most Cloud hosting companies were relying on sometimes faulty, encumbering and heavy storage architectures
- Most Cloud hosting companies were marketing to a widespread base of customers when they should have been marketing to a power small niche market
With these three ideas in mind, DigitalOcean set out to prove SSD’s were more efficient, reliable and cheaper than SAN, NAS or DAS by marketing to a niche market of developers, programmers and coders who all knew how to utilize and building applications off of the SSD storage infrastructure. Combine this with building an internal knowledgebase of Linux, Cloud, MySQL etc. how-to articles, video tutorials and coding breakdown, DigitalOcean has successfully marketed its Cloud SSD platform to the developer market and in turn, changed the entire industry forcing all sorts of Cloud providers to ditch SAN for SSD’s.
It should come as no surprise with the success of DigitalOcean, the young company is now the 11th largest Cloud server infrastructure provider in the world. In the course of over two years, the DigitalOcean is now challenging Amazon and Rackspace as the preeminent Cloud provider in the industry. With the success of DigitalOcean and SSD’s, the question now comes will the company and the storage platform continue to dominate the Cloud hosting market for the years to come or will DigitalOcean sink under its own weight?