Category Archives: Blitzscaling

HODLing Decentralized Storage is not zero sum

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I have been dipping my toes into decentralized storage. I wrote about “Crossing the Chasm” last month where most early technologies have to experience to move into the mainstream adoption. I believe the same undertaking is going on for decentralized storage and the undercurrents are beginning to feel like a tidal wave. However, the clarion calls and the narratives around decentralized storage are beginning to sound the same after several months on researching the subject.

Salient points of decentralized storage

I have summarized a bunch of these arguments for decentralized storage. They are:

  • Democratization of cloud storage services separate from the hyperscaling behemoths of Web2
  • Inherent data security with default encryption, immutability and blockchain-ed. (most decentralized storage are blockchain-based. A few are not)
  • Data privacy with the security key for data decryption and authentication with the data owner(s)
  • No centralized control of data storage services, prices, market transparency and sovereignty
  • Green with more efficient energy consumption compared to Bitcoin
  • Data durability with data sharding creating no single point of failure and maintaining continuous data access services with geo content dispersal

Rocket fuel – The cryptos

Most early adoptions of a new technology require some sort of bliztscaling momentum to break free from the gravity of the old one. The cryptocurrencies pegged to many decentralized storage platforms are the rocket fuel to power the conversations and the narratives of the decentralized storage today. I probably counted over a hundred of these types of cryptocurrencies, with more jumping into the bandwagon as the gravy train moves ahead.

The table below is part of a TechTarget Search Storage article “7 Decentralized Storage Networks compared“. I found this article most enlightening.

7 Decentralized Storage Compared

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Celebrating MinIO

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“Essentially MinIO is a web server …“

I vaguely recalled Anand Babu Periasamy (AB as he is known), the CEO of MinIO saying that when I first met him in 2017. I was fresh “playing around” with MinIO and instantly I fell in love with software technology. Wait a minute. Object storage wasn’t supposed to be so easy. It was not supposed to be that simple to set up and use, but MinIO burst into my storage universe like the birth of the Infinity Stones. There was a eureka moment. And I was attending one of the Storage Field Days in the US shortly after my MinIO discovery in late 2017. What an opportunity!

I could not recall how I made the appointment to meeting MinIO, but I recalled myself taking an Uber to their cosy office on University Avenue in Palo Alto to meet. Through Andy Watson (one of the CTOs then), I was introduced to AB, Garima Kapoor, MinIO’s COO and his wife, Frank Wessels, Zamin (one of the business people who is no longer there) and Ugur Tigli (East Coast CTO) who was on the Polycom. I was awe struck.

Last week, MinIO scored a major Series B round funding of USD103 million. It was delayed by the pandemic because I recalled Garima telling me that the funding was happening in 2020. But I think the delay made it better, because the world now is even more ready for MinIO than ever before.

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First looks into Interplanetary File System

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The cryptocurrency craze has elevated another strong candidate in recent months. Filecoin, is leading the voice of a decentralized Internet, the next generation Web 3.0. In this blog, I am not going to write much about the Filecoin frenzy but the underlying distributed file system that powers this phenomenon – The Interplanetary File System.

[ Note: This is still a very new area for me, and the rest of the content of this blog is still nascent and developing ]

Interplanetary File System

Tremulous Client-Server web architecture

The entire Internet architecture is almost client and server. Your clients like browsers, apps, connect to Web services served from a collection of servers. As Web 3.0 approaches (some say it is already here), the client-server model is no longer perceived as the Internet architecture of choice. Billions, and billions of users, applications, devices relying solely on a centralized service would lead to many impactful consequences, and the reasons for decentralization, away from the client-server architecture models of the Internet are cogent.

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Plotting the Crypto Coin Storage Farm

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The recent craze of the Chia cryptocurrency got me excited. Mostly because it uses storage as the determinant for the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm in a blockchain network. Yes, I am always about storage. 😉

I am not a Bitcoin miner nor am I a Chia coin farmer, and my knowledge and experience in both are very shallow. But I recently became interested in the 2 main activities of Chia – plotting and farming, because they both involved storage. I am writing this blog to find out more and document about my learning experience.

[ NB: This blog does not help you make money. It is just informational from a storage technology perspective. ]

Chia Cryptocurrency

Proof of Space and Time

Bitcoin is based on Proof-of-Work (PoW). In a nutshell, there is a complex mathematical puzzle to be solved. Bitcoin miners compete to solve this puzzle and the process uses high computational processing to solve it. Once solved, the miners are rewarded for their work.

Newer entrants like Filecoin and Chia coin (XCH) use an alternate method which is Proof-of-Space (PoS) to validate and verify the transactions. Instead of miners, Chia coin farmers have to prove to have a legitimate amount of disk and/or memory space to solve a mathematical puzzle, conceptually similar to the one in Bitcoin mining. In the beginning, this was great for folks who have unused disk space that can be “rented” out to store the crypto stuff (Note: I am not familiar with the terminology yet, and I did not want to use the word “crypto tokens” incorrectly). Storj was one of the early vendors that I remember in this space touting this method but I have not followed them for a while. Their business model might have changed.

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The prudence needed for storage technology companies

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Blitzscaling has been on my mind a lot. Ever since I discovered that word a while back, it has returned time and time again to fill my thoughts. In the wake of COVID-19, and in the mire of this devastating pandemic, is blitzscaling still the right strategy for this generation of storage technology, hyperconverged, data management and cloud storage startups?

What the heck is Blitzscaling? 

For the uninformed, here’s a video of Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linked and a member of the Paypal mafia, explaining Blitzscaling.

Blitzscaling is about hyper growing, scaling ultra fast and rocketing to escape velocity, at the expense of things like management efficiency, financial prudence, profits and others. While this blog focuses on storage companies, blitzscaling is probably most recognizable in the massive expansion of Uber (and contraction) a few years ago. In the US, the ride hailing war is between Uber and Lyft, but over here in South East Asia, just a few years back, it was between Uber and Grab. In China it was Uber and Didi.

From the storage angle, 2 segments exemplified the blitzscaling culture between 2015 and 2020.

  • All Flash Startups
  • Hyper Converged Infrastructure Startups

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