Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why I think MapR missed the mark. They had a software only solution one could deploy on a top of generic hardware in a data center to solve hundreds of TB to small number of PB storage problem that was real for enterprises and since those nodes would also be able to do compute jobs that was the way to get enterprises to adapt that technology. Going to object store was possible but it required dev time and in t…
Interesting post. Out of curiosity: aren't there others who have developed cluster storage exposed as NFS / FUSE?
Fundamentally, file system clusters are a very difficult business to get into and make enough money to justify being in that business. On a low end there's open source stuff that kind of sort of works. Selling consulting on a top of it is at best a ramen-profitable business. No one is buying a Ceph-consulting for a million dollars if they run a business that needs that size of storage -- the data is too valuable to do a semi-custom solution and be a test case for Ceph, Gluster, etc.
On the top end there are EMCs of the world with $350K/node pricing + yearly 10% support contract. Finally, there's a "rewrite the app" alternative ( call it 1 year, million $ price tag to move to object store ) that a customer company is always considering.
So the sweet spot is enterprise solution with a license cost of about $12k-$24k per year per node which has EMC/Isilon/NetApp-like functionality that unbundles software from hardware. The tricky part is that it needs to be a proven solution that works on the comparable EMC/Isilon/NetApp sized deployments. To do that one needs to have a lot of excellent engineers that cost a lot of money, a lot of sales engineers that intrinsically understand the commonality between the customers' requirements and can explain it to those engineers and a lot of very expensive test beds.