Cloud Storage Status Check

As cloud storage continues to become more pervasive, we are starting to see some maturing in the market place and some settling in on use cases. There are four common use cases: backup, archive, distribution and collaboration.

The backup use case is moving beyond the consumer model and even the prosumer model from companies like Mozy or Carbonite and into more of the SMB market. The most common approach here is to use a hybrid deployment where your most frequent data sets are local and then are replicated to the cloud. As we stated in our article on SMB Cloud Backup, companies like Axcient and DS3 are well down the road of providing this sort of functionality.

Archive will eventually be the lion share of the cloud capacity used in business. It is an ideal use case for the cloud -- get that old data out of your facility and into someone else's. The movement is secure, featuring end-to-end encryption, and many providers don''t even keep the encryption keys, so they can't see your data even if they wanted to. Again, the hybrid model is gaining in popularity here as well. This allows your archive to be as simple as copying old data to an appliance that appears to be a bottomless NFS or CIFS mount point. Companies like Nirvanix, Bycast and Iron Mountain are all offering products or services in this space.

In archive there is work to be done to leverage the API set that these offerings have. For example, I would like to tag an item on archive with specific metadata. Ideally, I could indicate retention time and redundancy prior to initiating the archive. Depending on where the cloud archive is in the stack depends on who provides this.

As for distribution or collaboration, they seem to be more of a service provider offering at this point. They typically utilize one of the cloud infrastructure products from a host of providers like the aforementioned Nirvanix or Bycast but also Mezeo and Parscale or one of the more "system-like" approaches of EMC Atmos or Cleversafe. Also look for cloud specific offerings from the more traditional archive, scalable storage companies like Permabit or Nexsan as well.

From there, service providers are going to take these infrastructures and run with them. We are beginning to see separation in this area as well. Box.net has adopted almost a Facebook-type model to collaboration, where Soonr has leveraged its backup capabilities to get your data to the cloud automatically, then allows you to share or stream content based on use. Dropbox and SpiderOak have developed very strong multi-platform backup and sync agents that stay out of your way and just syncs and enables sharing.

In the sharing space there is a need to improve the check in/check out status of a file. I want to know instantly who is working on what. In streaming, I want to know who is streaming a file, how long they watched that file and provide a place for comments or questions as they watch it.

The cloud storage and cloud service markets are so robust there are hundreds if not thousands of offerings here, and the fact that I didn't mention a product doesn't mean that they are not viable, just that I either don't know them or I forgot. I'm sure I'll be getting emails from all the ones I left out.

The point though is that cloud storage is beginning to become segmented into specific use cases and each of those use cases make sense and are made better because of the cloud.