All posts by Richard

Amazon AWS, EVault, Hard disk drive, Hardware, Magnetic storage, Seagate, Seagate Technology, Storage

Seagate’s eVault Reportedly Developing New “Cold Storage” Tech to Compete with AWS Glacier

Very interesting, though somewhat speculative, article today in The Register that outlines some new technology that may make a disk-based competitor to Amazon’s Glacier as cheap but faster:

“EVault, according to our storage gossips, is going to use disks, next-generation slow and energy-efficient drives from parent Seagate, probably shingled magnetic recording drives, and thus be able to generate restores which are potentially faster than those achieved on Glacier.”

For details and full-on speculation, read the article.

Amazon, Amazon AWS, Azure, Cloud Storage, File hosting service, Google, Microsoft, Nirvanix, Storage, Venture Funding

Nirvanix Shutdown: Collateral Damage in Big Players’ Price War?

The sudden shutdown of Nirvanix, an early but recently faltering participant in the “pure-play” Online Storage space dominated by the likes of AWS S3, Microsoft Azure and Google, is in large part a result of downward pressure on prices as the big players continually lower theirs. Amazon, for instance, launched S3 in 2006 and charged $0.15 per gigabyte-month. After many step-wise price cuts S3 is down to $0.095 per gigabyte-month.

Pure online storage is fast becoming the sole province of vendors who either enjoy economies of scale, or who treat their offerings as a loss-leader to get other business (or a combination of both).

Smaller players may have to add value in other ways to survive. Nirvanix was not profitable, and when their latest round of funding came up short it was the last nail in their coffin.

BitTorrent, BitTorrent Bundle, Direct-to-Fan, File Sharing, Filesharing, Social

How the New BitTorrent Bundles Aims to Combine Content, Social and Commerce

The people behind the format responsible for about a tenth of internet traffic, and until now the bane of content publishers, now aims to build content, social and (they fervently hope) commerce into their new BitTorrent Bundles. As the website puts it:

 ”(BitTorrent Bundles is the) first media store by the people, for the people. BitTorrent Bundles is where you can access a world of content, direct from artists. Browse titles from some of our favorite creators. Unlock music and film exclusives. Play what you want. Pay what you want.”

Amazon AWS, Amazon Glacier, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, Riverbed Technology, Storage, Whitewater

Riverbed Upgrades Storage Appliances, Seeks to Leverage Amazon Glacier Backup

Riverbed Technology today announced it has expanded its Whitewater cloud storage appliance family with the addition of new hardware models and upgrades to its operating system. The new Riverbed Whitewater appliances and OS provide more capacity, faster ingest speeds and more replication options. These features and capabilities make the new Whitewater appliances a critical component for enterprises wishing to leverage the economical price and reliability of cloud storage options such as Amazon Glacier.

Enhancements include new Whitewater model appliances with up to triple the cache of previous models and support of up to 14.4 petabytes of logical data. The Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) 3.0 also offers new features, including pairwise replication that enable enterprises to replicate to an additional Whitewater appliance at a secondary location. In addition, enterprises can now leverage the 10 gigabit networking interface that dramatically improves ingest performance.

Customers that deploy the Whitewater 3030 model appliance can save more than $750,000 over a three year period when backing up to Amazon Glacier. With varying requirements for recovery time objectives (RTO) of certain data sets, the ability to recover certain data sets locally and immediately has also become increasingly important.

The new WWOS 3.0 offers support for pairwise replication for Whitewater appliances that allows enterprises greater flexibility to choose the appropriate recovery option to meet their RTO based on their business continuity plans. For the fastest RTO, a Whitewater appliance can recover at disk speed to a secondary site. In addition, the new OS offers a pinning feature that allows enterprises to tier and choose which backup data sets are available on the Whitewater appliance cache for immediate access, while less critical backup data sets can be recovered from the cloud.

The three new Whitewater model (730, 2030, 3030) appliances offer between 8 to 96 TB usable cache capacity. The largest model, WWA-3030, can cache up to three times the amount of data as the previous largest model (3010) and can support backup & archive datasets of up to 14.4 petabytes[1] before it is compressed and deduplicated onto the local cache.

For faster performance, enterprises can also choose to use 10 gigabit networking interfaces to get up to 2.5 terabytes per hour ingest performance, a 40 percent increase over previous models. The 10 gigabit networking interface also enables enterprises to transfer to Amazon Glacier cloud storage leveraging Amazon Direct Connect.

Collaboration, Document Management, File Sharing, File synchronization, Storage, Zoho, Zoho Docs, Zoho Office Suite

Zoho Docs Desktop App Get Two-Way File Sync

Zoho today announced it has added Zoho Docs for Desktop, adding two-way file synchronization capability to Zoho Docs, the company’s online document management application with integrated online office suite. Zoho Docs users can now synchronize files on their local Windows, Mac and Linux desktop and laptop computers with the cloud as well as sync their cloud files with their local computers.

“Making user’s files available at all locations is an important feature of a document management system. We are happy to offer two-way file synchronization capability to Windows, Mac and Linux users,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho evangelist. “Zoho users now get a powerful two-way file synchronization capability combined with expanded storage options and a tightly integrated online office suite, making this a unique offering for businesses.”

Zoho Docs for Desktop allows users to sync their Zoho Docs files and folders to Windows, Mac or Linux laptop or desktop computers. Users can sync all files and folders or pick specific folders to sync. With the sync folder in place on authorized computers, users will have the files available both in the Zoho Docs cloud folder as well as on their computers at the same time.

Cloud Storage, Nirvanix, Outage Alert, Storage

Online Storage Provider Nirvanix Reportedly Two Weeks From Shutdown

According to a report today in Information Age:

“US-based cloud storage provider Nirvanix tells employees it has “gone to the wall”, gives customers until the end of the month to move their data elsewhere .”

The company was founded in 2007 after an online storage company called StreamLoad split into consumer and business units. Not longer after, the consumer arm – MediaMax – gave customers one month to relocate their data following a botched migration onto the Nirvanix platform.

(Source)

Box, Cloud Storage, Collaboration, File Sharing, File system, Filesharing, Storage

The Notion of the File is Fading Away

The most interesting takeaway from a Wired article on Box’s move to include collaborative editing in its file sharing service:

“…what’s happening now is that the applications are becoming the primary portals to our data, and the notion of the file is fading away. As Levie indicates, you never browse a PC-like file system on your phone. You access your data through applications, and so often, that data resides not on your local device, but on a cloud service somewhere across the net.”

Read the article.

 

Amazon S3, Drew Houston, DropBox, Mozy, Start Up, Storage, USB flash drive, Venture Funding, Y Combinator

Drew Houston’s Y Combinator Pitch for Dropbox

Here are some choice tidbits from Drew Houston’s application for Y Combinator backing:

What is your company going to make?  
Dropbox synchronizes files across your/your team’s computers. It’s much better than uploading or email, because it’s automatic, integrated into Windows, and fits into the way you already work. There’s also a web interface, and the files are securely backed up to Amazon S3. Dropbox is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them “just work” for the average individual or team. Hackers have access to these tools, but normal people don’t.

There are lots of interesting possible features. One is syncing Google Docs/Spreadsheets (or other office web apps) to local .doc and .xls files for offline access, which would be strategically important as few web apps deal with the offline problem.

What’s new about what you’re doing?  
Most small teams have a few basic needs: (1) team members need their important stuff in front of them wherever they are, (2) everyone needs to be working on the latest version of a given document (and ideally can track what’s changed), (3) and team data needs to be protected from disaster. There are sync tools (e.g. beinsync, Foldershare), there are backup tools (Carbonite, Mozy), and there are web uploading/publishing tools (box.net, etc.), but there’s no good integrated solution.

Dropbox solves all these needs, and doesn’t need configuration or babysitting. Put another way, it takes concepts that are proven winners from the dev community (version control, changelogs/trac, rsync, etc.) and puts them in a package that my little sister can figure out (she uses Dropbox to keep track of her high school term papers, and doesn’t need to burn CDs or carry USB sticks anymore.)

At a higher level, online storage and local disks are big and cheap. But the internet links in between have been and will continue to be slow in comparison. In “the future”, you won’t have to move your data around manually. The concept that I’m most excited about is that the core technology in Dropbox — continuous efficient sync with compression and binary diffs — is what will get us there.

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don’t get?  
Competing products work at the wrong layer of abstraction and/or force the user to constantly think and do things. The “online disk drive” abstraction sucks, because you can’t work offline and the OS support is extremely brittle. Anything that depends on manual emailing/uploading (i.e. anything web-based) is a non-starter, because it’s basically doing version control in your head. But virtually all competing services involve one or the other.

With Dropbox, you hit “Save”, as you normally would, and everything just works, even with large files (thanks to binary diffs).

What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn’t exist yet?
Email themselves attachments. Upload stuff to online storage sites or use online drives like Xdrive, which don’t work on planes. Carry around USB drives, which can be lost, stolen, or break/get bad sectors. Waste time revising the wrong versions of given documents, resulting in Frankendocuments that contain some changes but lose others. My friend Reuben is switching his financial consulting company from a PHP-based CMS to a beta of Dropbox because all they used it for was file sharing. Techies often hack together brittle solutions involving web hosting, rsync, and cron jobs.

Want more detail? Read the full application.