ScaleMP Founder and President Shai Fultheim sat down with me for some time at ISC to discuss the company’s most recent vSMP announcement at ISC in Hamburg yesterday. While the high-end virtualization and server aggregation is not always the most relevant to the HPC and cloud space in every sense, I was surprised to see ScaleMP’s head sitting in front of a backdrop advertising cloud computing. While we were able to have a briefing about his company and end users that will be the subject of a later piece, throughout the interview my eyes kept pacing back to the “cloud computing” graphic in bright letters behind him. Following our more formal interview, I asked him to connect the dots to the cloud–and was rather surprised at the reaction. Like other companies in the HPC and general enterprise space (from the high to very low end of the compute spectrum) the term “cloud” is thrown about without a sense of what it means in the context of the company or its primary product offerings.
Shai Fultheim was more than willing to address the question, seeing it as a marketing issue versus a matter based on confusion about clouds. His response sparked the following discussion…