* Posts by greg schulz

3 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Dec 2011

Oracle buys desktop software virtualiser GreenBytes

greg schulz

Valuation?

The article speculates around acquisition price perhaps being a 3x multiple, that could possibly be the case of a multiple were applicable. What if no multiple were applicable and the investors were simply looking to break even & cut there losses or even less if in a fire / liquidation close out sale? Of course if the acquisition were based on the market hype the multiple might apply, otoh if there were nothing of significant value, it could have been an unadvertised bargain shoppers special.

EMC's million-IOPS VNX2 monster delayed

greg schulz

AWS virtual storage revenues seem a bit cloudy?

The post states that AWS storage revenues are $2B, is that in USD or Euro?

Note that Amazon reports Product, Services and Others, where a common mistake might be to conclude that AWS is services, however keep in mind that Amazon has services such as Prime for video, audio, not to mention Kindle and Amazon Studios that are not AWS.

Amazon states as of Q113 (e.g. back in April) that their "Other" earnings had a Trailing Twelve Month (TTM) earning of about $2.820B (USD) which includes other non product sales such as marketing, promo, other seller sites, credit cards and AWS.

Thus a reasonable estimate would be that AWS accounts for around 70-75% of "Other Revenue" so at 75% TTM that would be about $2.115B (USD) in revenue, however also keep in mind the following. EC2 is estimated to be in excess of 60% of AWS Revenues, with Storage (e.g. S3 (Standard + RR + Glacier) + EBS + RDS) making up around 21% with the balance being other services (ELB, CDN, etc...) plus fees (API, IO, Bandwdith, Event notifications via CloudWatch etc among others). Thus some rough math shows that AWS storage is more like $0.444B, however for fun, lets also keep in mind that some of the "Other AWS" bucket includes some storage, as well as EC2 images can have storage (regular HDD or SSD) with high storage space and high IO instances, similar to DAS in a regular server you could buy. Since we are all just speculating and throwing numbers out here or perhaps using some Piroma calculations/estimates/modeling techniques, lets say AWS storage using the above (e.g. estimated storage + plus some of the storage from EC2 and RDS not to mention a portion of the other fees is around $0.899B (USD) which IMHO is on the agressive side.

So where is the other $1.1B (USD) in estimated AWS storage revenue coming from that is mentioned in the above post as non of the financial analyst seem to have that insight nor anything found in the Amazon SEC filings? Otoh, perhaps there is something being lost in currency translation from dollars to Euros, however that too would be an ugly exchange rate.

Now on the other hand, lets pretend and speculate for a minute that by chance AWS is actually at a TTM storage revenue rate of $2B USD, that does not reflect how much space capacity is being deployed and if AWS is actually using storage as a loss leader for other things.

Likewise if that speculated $2B USD storage revenue were real today, keep in mind that would also include comparable database software sales and some server, thus not just apples to apples of comparison between a storage vendor storage sales to AWS. A more comparable or target market comparison then would be AWS vs. Storage Vendors + Database software vendors + plus some others.

Does this mean AWS is not a force to be taken lightly? AWS is growing and is the giant with others in the market (e.g. Rackspace growth their offerings from hosting to include more cloud, Azure, Joyent, HP, Centurylink/Savvis and many others)...

For those who are interested in learning more about AWS EBS, EC2, S3, Glacier and associated themes check out this primer (multi-part series): http://storageioblog.com/cloud-conversations-aws-ebs-optimized-instances/

Cheers gs

@StorageIO

Storageioblog.com

Nekkid Tech: Where are the new enterprise bibles?

greg schulz

Episode #11 follow-up, free chapter download and special discount code

Thanks for the opportunity to be a guest on your new show, enjoyed the conversation with you Greg and Gina.

Here is a URL to a free download (PDF) of chapter 1 "Industry Trends" from Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press):

http://storageio.com/DownloadItems/CVDSN_Chapter%201.pdf

Also in addition to Amazon and other venues around the world, here ( http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781439851739 ) is a link to the publishers site where a special discount code (KVK01) can be applied before check out for a 30% discount for the hardcopy version.

Watch for a Kindle and other epub besides PDF versions to appear soon.

Cheers

gs