Boutique cloud service providers. Specialty cloud service providers. Sub-hyperscale cloud service providers.

Call them what you like — there is a new class of cloud service providers emerging. They can’t hack the astronomical data centers of Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google Cloud Platform. They need new, leaner, multitasking infrastructure on which to run their services.

They particularly need advanced flash storage, according to Joel Dedrick (pictured), vice president and general manager of network storage software at Toshiba Memory America Inc. “They want to operate in the cloud style,” he said. “But they really can’t invent it all soup-to-nuts with their own engineering. They need some pieces to come from outside.”

Toshiba is taking raw flash solid state drives and turning them into a block storage service for these providers. This results in lower cost and greater performance and operational efficiency — for smaller cloud providers, Dedrick pointed out. 

Dedrick spoke with Peter Burris for a CUBE Conversation at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed Toshiba’s efforts to serve this emerging market with advanced flash storage. (* Disclosure below.)

Disaggregation cures allocation aggravation

Toshiba’s new offerings leverage the latest in flash SSDs and non-volatile memory express over fabric. They benefit cloud service providers by disaggregating resources so that the storage is not pinned to a particular compute node. This disaggregation is the general model that allows the Googles and Amazons to move work around machines. It enables service providers to optimize all resources in a data center in a fluid, rapid way.

Dedrick concedes that Toshiba isn’t solving the whole problem, but a piece of it with offerings like KumoScale shared accelerated storage software.

“We’ll take the storage out of the individual compute nodes and service it back to you over your network, but we don’t lose the performance that you’re used to having it locally attached,” he explained.

This helps solve a common problem in other types of businesses too. Often, there is one side of the house in a data center with a glut of idle machines procured for peak activity; meanwhile another side is starved for them. This technology allows both sides to draw from the same pool of resources.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Toshiba Memory America Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Toshiba nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE