I cannot agree more Chuck. What Google/Facebook/Twitter and others have achieved at scale is nothing less than amazing. Reality however is indeed that the majority of companies have hundreds, if not thousands of different applications and of which the majority is provided by a 3rd party. Typically developed by 3 or 4 folks in an ancient language and chances of it evolving in the upcoming 5 years are minimal. You cannot expect those companies supporting that many applications to run their IT the same way as a company which IT is solely focused on providing this 1 (2 or 3) different services to a customer.

I would Tom if I did not have one of the coolest jobs at the source already :-). But I do agree, this is one great opportunity!

Couple of things: - diagram says "Vmware" - Are there any prices available? - Will it also hold SSD? - Any performance numbers around storage? Excellent piece of kit for SMB type of "Cloud in a box" or "VDI in a box" type of deployments.