Posts tagged ‘Cloud’

Jul 7

Has EMC killed the cloud storage market even before it got going?

The concept behind cloud storage (like many cloud type things these days) is simple. Why pay big bucks out on expensive to buy and expensive to run storage tin when you can take your storage as a managed service delivered over the WAN and paid for on a per GB basis?

Everybody has been getting in on the band wagon. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace and so on.

Now the downside to the industry is that companies who buy cloud storage are going to be spending much less with the traditional storage vendors such as HDS, EMC and NetApps. So the traditional storage vendors are doing one of two things. There are those who are taking the FUD route. Warning you that your data in the cloud may not be secure. What if your data connections go down? What SLA can the cloud supplier really offer? What if the cloud supplier goes out of business? You get the idea.

But the cloud storage vendors are quick to point out that they offer comprehensive SLAs and that they are big and stable companies and the risk of them going bust is small.

EMC is one such supplier who has been selling it’s Atmos cloud based storage solution to all who will buy it on the back of the big company credentials and solid SLAs.

So when EMC suddenly decided to pull the plug on Atmos last week, you have to question their motives!

Existing customers will now have to go through the pain of migrating what could be huge volumes of data, off Atmos and onto a new cloud storage platform. In some cases a company may even be forced to invest in a new SAN (and I am sure the EMC rep will be along very soon to help them do this) as they will have lost all trust in cloud storage from any vendor.

But if EMC can do this, what is to stop Microsoft or Rackspace or one of any number of small providers doing the same?

So any organisation looking at cloud based storage will now no doubt stop and rethink this decision. Is the risk just too high?

In some cases the answer will be yes and they will invest in traditional onsite SANs just like they always did.

In any case, EMC has now successfully cast a level of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) into the cloud storage market place which is going to impact take up of these services and drive the sales of onsite SANs back up again. The cynic in me has to question if Atmos has all been one big campaign to damage the cloud based storage market in the first place. After all, one of the main companies to gain from this would be EMC themselves and that just feels wrong.

May 18

One cloud to sync them all (or not as the case may be)

Over the last few years I have used various free and paid for sync services. Utopia for me is to have a folder full of documents and files that exists on all devices I use including mobile.

So previously, I found that Microsoft Live Mesh did that job. It had a client for Windows, Mac and Windows Mobile as well as a web portal. I could add any folder on any device to my “Mesh” and it would sync with all other devices in the Mesh in near real time.

In reality that meant that if I took a photo with the camera on my phone, in a matter of seconds, that photo had been copied back to my desktop onto my web based storage.

The only thing I did not like however was that Mesh had another feature. It allowed you to connect via the internet to any other machine in the Mesh and create a remote desktop session giving you full control over the remote machine. This was not something that could be switched off in the software (although a registry hack soon killed the feature for me).

But now I have moved to Android and I cannot find a replacement. Mesh does not have an Android client and I have yet to find anything else that does 2 way sync.

I have tried Zumodrive, SugarSync, DropBox and others but they all have 2 distinct downfalls.

1. I cannot add existing folders on my desktop into the sync. I can only sync files that are inside the applications own folders

2. I cannot add any folders on my mobile device to the sync

This is very much a 1 way sync process and very frustrating. Indeed with some of these applications, they do not sync with the phone at all. Instead when you click on the file you want to open, you have to wait for that file to download off the server. This has 2 downsides.

1. If I am out and about, I am reliant on using the 3G data connection on my phone which can be expensive

2. If I am out of coverage, I cannot get the file at all.

To me, this is not file synchronisation at all.

Now the worse thing is that Mesh is nearing the end of it’s life. With the next release of the Windows Live web applications we are going to see Windows Live Sync and Windows Live Mesh merge with Windows Live SkyDrive. This should be a good thing but what do we think the odds are of a client for non Windows mobile devices?

So I am stuck.

I can’t sync files off my mobile device easily and can’t sync files onto my mobile device to be used offline later.

Whilst I am sure there must be an app for that, I can’t find it so any clues?