Archivo de la categoría: Storage

Google Says Drive Problem Resolved, Wants to Hear From You if You Still Have a Problem

According to Google, the outage for some Google Drive users should be completely resolved.

Still having a problem? Then Google want to hear about it:

The problem with Google Drive should be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. Please rest assured that system reliability is a top priority at Google, and we are making continuous improvements to make our systems better. If you are still experiencing an issue, please contact us via the Google Help Center.

Google Drive Outage Updates

From the Google App Status Dashboard:

March 18, 2013 7:17:00 AM PDT

We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Drive. We will provide more information shortly.

 March 18, 2013 8:10:00 AM PDT

We’re aware of a problem with Google Drive affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are unable to access Google Drive. We will provide an update by March 18, 2013 9:10:00 AM PDT detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.

March 18, 2013 8:55:00 AM PDT

Google Drive service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users within the next 1 hours. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

CloudBerry Adds SFTP to Explorer 3.8

CloudBerry Lab, a provider of backup and management solutions for public cloud storage services, has added secure ftp to the newest release of Cloudberry Explorer version 3.8, an application that allows accessing, moving and managing data in remote locations such as FTP servers and public cloud storage services including Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Windows Azure, OpenStack and others.

In the new version of CloudBerry Explorer SFTP server is supported as one of the remote location options. Now users can perform file access, file transfer and file management operations across SFTP server and local storage.

Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) also known as SSH File Transfer Protocol is an extension of the SSH-2 protocol that provides a secure file transfer capability. This protocol assumes that it is run over a secure channel, such as SSH, that the server has already authenticated the client, and that the identity of the client user is available to the protocol.

Riverbed’s Whitewater Adds AWS Glacier, Google Storage Support

Riverbed Technology today announced Whitewater Operating System (WWOS) version 2.1 with support for Amazon Glacier storage and Google Cloud storage. WWOS 2.1 increases operational cost savings and high data durability from cloud storage services, improving disaster recovery readiness. In addition, Riverbed introduced larger virtual Whitewater appliances that allow customers to support larger data sets, improve disaster recovery capabilities, and manage multiple Whitewater appliances from a single window with a management console. These enhancements to the Whitewater cloud storage product family help enterprises use cloud storage to meet critical backup requirements, modernize data management strategies, and overcome challenges created by data growth.

“Once created, most unstructured data is rarely accessed after 30-90 days. Leveraging the cloud for storing these data sets makes a lot of sense, particularly given the attractive prices of storage services designed for long-term such as Amazon Glacier,” said Dan Iacono, research director from IDC’s storage practice. “The ability of cloud storage devices to cache locally and provide access to recent data provides real benefits from an operational cost perspective to avoid unnecessary transfer costs from the cloud.”

Cloud Storage Ecosystem Expansion Riverbed is offering customers choice and flexibility for data protection by adding Amazon Glacier and Google Cloud storage to its Whitewater cloud storage ecosystem. Now, Whitewater customers using Amazon Glacier cloud storage have immediate access to recent backup data while enjoying pricing from Amazon as low as one cent per gigabyte per month — approximately eight times cheaper than other currently available cloud storage offerings.

In addition, the extremely high data durability offered by Amazon cloud storage services and the ability to access the data from any location with an Internet connection greatly improves an organization’s disaster recovery (DR) readiness.

Larger Virtual Whitewater Appliances With the introduction of the larger virtual Whitewater appliances, Riverbed allows customers preferring virtual appliances to protect larger data sets as well as simplify disaster recovery. The new virtual Whitewater appliances support local cache sizes of four or eight terabytes and integrate seamlessly with leading data protection applications as well as all popular cloud storage services. To streamline management for enterprise wide deployments, WWOS 2.1 includes new management capabilities that enable monitoring and administration of all Whitewater devices from a single console with one-click drill down into any appliance.

“We have been successfully using Riverbed Whitewater appliances for backup with Amazon S3 in our facilities in Germany, Switzerland, and the U.S. since June 2012,” said Drew Bartow, senior information technology engineer at Tipper Tie. “We were eager to test the Whitewater 3010 appliance with Amazon Glacier and the total time to configure and start moving data to Glacier was just 24 minutes. With Glacier and Whitewater we could potentially save considerably on backup storage costs.”

“The features in WWOS 2.1 and the larger virtual appliances drastically change the economics of data protection,” said Ray Villeneuve, vice president corporate development, at Riverbed. “With our advanced, in-line deduplication and optimization technologies, Whitewater shrinks data stored in the cloud by up to 30 times on average — for example, Whitewater customers can now store up to 100 terabytes of backup data that is not regularly accessed in Amazon Glacier for as little as $2,500.00 per year. The operational cost savings and high data durability from cloud storage services improve disaster recovery readiness and will continue to rapidly accelerate the movement from tape-based and replicated disk systems to cloud storage.”

The Fracturing of the Enterprise Brain

Never mind BYOD (bring your own device), employee use of non-corporate online storage solutions could lead to the weakening of enterprise ability to access company data and intellectual property. In the worst case scenario, companies could lose information forever.

A post by Brian Proffitt at ReadWrite Enterprise explains:

Employees are the keepers of knowledge within a company. Want to run the monthly payroll? The 20-year-veteran in accounting knows how to manage that. Building the new company logo? The superstar designer down in the art department is your gal. When such employees leave the company, it can be a bumpy transition, but usually not impossible, because the data they’ve been using lies on the corporate file server and can be used to piece together the work that’s been done.

Of course, that’s based on the premise that, for the past couple of decades or so, data has essentially been stored in one of two places: on the file servers or the employee’s local computer.

Today, though, people store data in a variety of places, not all of it under the direct control of IT. Gmail, Dropbox, Google Drive or a company’s cloud on Amazon Web Services…

Read the article.

The Newest Data-Storage Device is DNA?

By Randy Weis

Molecular and DNA Storage Devices- “Ripped from the headlines!”

-Researchers used synthetic DNA encoded to create the zeros and ones of digital technology.

-MIT Scientists Achieve Molecular Data Storage Breakthrough

-DNA may soon be used for storage: All of the world’s information, about 1.8 zettabytes, could be stored in about four grams of DNA

Harvard stores 70 billion books using DNA: Research team stores 5.5 petabits, or 1 million gigabits, per cubic millimeter in DNA  storage medium

IBM using DNA, nanotech to build next-generation chips: DNA works with nanotubes to build more powerful, energy-efficient easy-to-manufacture chips

Don’t rush out to your reseller yet! This stuff is more in the realm of science fiction at the moment, although the reference links at the end of this post are to serious scientific journals. It is tough out here at the bleeding edge of storage technology to find commercial or even academic applications for the very latest, but this kind of storage technology, along with quantum storage and holographic storage, will literally change the world. Wearable, embedded storage technology for consumers may be a decade or more down the road, but you know that there will be military and research applications long before Apple gets this embedded in the latest 100 TB iPod. Ok, deep breath—more realistically, where will this technology be put into action first? Let’s see how this works first.

DNA is a three dimensional media, with density capabilities of up to a zettabyte in a millimeter volume. Some of this work is being done with artificial DNA, injected into genetically modified bacteria (from a Japanese research project from last year). A commercially available genetic sequencer was used for this.

More recently, researchers in Britain encoded the “I Have a Dream” speech and some Shakespeare Sonnets in synthetic DNA strands. Since DNA can be recovered from 20,000 year old wooly mammoth bones, this has far greater potential for long term retrievable storage than, say, optical disks (notorious back in the 90s for delaminating after 5 years).

Reading the DNA is more complicated and expensive, and the “recording” process is very slow. It should be noted that no one is suggesting storing data in a living creature at this point.

Molecular storage is also showing promise, in binding different molecules in a “supramolecule” to store up to 1 petabyte per square inch. But this is a storage media in two dimensions, not three. This still requires temperatures of -9 degrees, considered “room temperature” by physicists. This work was done in India and Germany. IBM is working with DNA and carbon nanotube “scaffolding” to build nano devices in their labs today.

Where would this be put to work first? Google and other search engines, for one. Any storage manufacturer would be interested—EMC DNA, anyone? Suggested use cases: globally and nationally important information of “historical value” and the medium-term future archiving of information of high personal value that you want to preserve for a couple of generations, such as wedding video for grandchildren to see.  The process to lay the data down and then to decode it makes the first use case of data archiving the most likely. The entire Library of Congress could be stored in something the size of a couple of sugar cubes, for instance.

What was once unthinkable (or at least only in the realm of science fiction) has become reality in many cases: drones, hand held computers with more processing power than that which sent man to the moon, and terabyte storage in home computers. The future of data storage is very bright and impossible to predict. Stay tuned.

Here is a graphic from Nature Journal (the Shakespeare Sonnets), “Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA” http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11875.html#/ref10

Click here to learn more about how GreenPages can help you with your organization’s storage strategy

Other References:

Researchers used synthetic DNA encoded to create the zeros and ones of digital technology.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/01/23/dna-information-storage/1858801/

MIT Scientists Achieve Molecular Data Storage Breakthrough

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/01/mit-scientists-achieve-molecular-data-storage-near-room-temperature.php

DNA may soon be used for storage

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9236176/DNA_may_soon_be_used_for_storage?source=CTWNLE_nlt_storage_2013-01-28

Harvard stores 70 billion books using DNA

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9230401/Harvard_stores_70_billion_books_using_DNA

IBM using DNA, nanotech to build next-generation chips

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9136744/IBM_using_DNA_nanotech_to_build_next_generation_chips

 

Dropbox API Allows Developers to Get Sync With Less Effort

Dropbox today announced a new application programming interface for in-app synch. The new API is intended to lure developers to Dropbox by making programmers’ life  easier by letting their native iOS/Android apps treat users’ cloud-based files as if they were stored locally.

“Give your app its own private Dropbox client and leave the syncing to us.”

Learn more at Dropbox.

Cubby cloud sync, storage service From LogMeInOut of Beta

LogMeIn Inc.  announced the general availability of its new cloud sync and storage service, Cubby. An easy-to-use, secure cloud service for sharing files across devices and with other people, Cubby offers the flexibility to turn any number of PC or Mac folders into ‘cubbies’ that can be accessed from Android phones and tablets, iPads and iPhones, as well other PCs and Macs from virtually anywhere in the world.

People can quickly share individual files or entire folders with others via a simple one-click link, or can choose to invite friends, colleagues, clients, and business partners into their ‘cubbies’ to collaborate across shared files and projects. The free version, Cubby Basic, includes Cubby’s signature sync-in-place flexibility (any folder can be a ‘cubby’), free desktop and mobile apps, 5GB of cloud storage, and the ability to share files via the cloud.

A premium version, Cubby Pro, builds on this by offering the flexibility to share content across computers with or without the cloud (via Cubby’s distinct DirectSync™ mode), additional controls for sharing your most sensitive content, multi-user accounts, and 100GB or more of cloud storage.

BitTorrent Sync Aims to Replace Cloud With Peer-to-Peer for File Synchronization

The folks responsible for peer-to-peer downloads of (mostly) appropriated music and videos are in pre-alpha with BitTorrent Sync, which aims straight at Dropbox and its ilk for multi-device file synchronization. They are looking for early testers and promise native clients for Windows, OS X and Linux, with hints of smartphone support.

Today, BitTorrent Sync is in a pre-Alpha stage. And we’re hoping that users like you can help us build something sick. If you’re comfortable using early, incomplete software, and if you’re committed to helping us figure out a better way to sync, we want to hear from you.

If you are interested, sign up here.

 

CloudBerry Introduces Smart Restore for Amazon Glacier

CloudBerry Lab today released CloudBerry Explorer v. 3.7.2 an application that allows users to manage files in Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier just as if they were on their local computers.

In the new release CloudBerry Explorer allows users controlling the restore cost in Amazon Glacier that is charged based on the peak usage per hour in a given month. Smart Restore functionality enables users to specify peak retrieval rate to keep the cost on the required level and to run the restore process in the background.

The new version also comes with the ability to display Amazon Glacier storage using the Folder View to make it easier for PC users to work with the storage.

Smart Restore and Folder View features are available in both versions of CloudBerry Explorer: Freeware and PRO.

Freeware version offers basic storage management capabilities such as browsing, creating, and deleting files, folders, buckets and vaults and uploading content from your PC to Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier storage and vice versa. CloudBerry Explorer Freeware is available for download at http://www.cloudberrylab.com/free

PRO version offers some advanced features over Freeware version. It costs $39.99 per license.