Bad week for cloud storage

Last week, we saw a good bit of rain falling on cloud storage’s parade. First there was another Amazon outage. Then it came to light that a cloud storage site called The Linkup (nee MediaMax) has completely failed, because of an apparent problem with data migration. At least that’s what it sounds like from their blog post about going out of business:

It was not possible to satisfactorily complete the move of files from MediaMax to The Linkup as we had expected, and as a result cannot offer a service that meets your expectations and our business requirements. This is a very disappointing outcome for us, and we know it has been a frustrating experience for many of our customers.

Maybe the owners of The Linkup could bounce back by taking Xdrive off AOL’s hands for the bargain price of $5 million and starting over.

Generally, I reserve judgment on the ultimate fate of cloud storage services. I know that online storage had a brief period of interest during the tech bubble but never went anywhere, and some believe this is more of the same. But I can be convinced, for now, that this time might be different. Small outfits such as The Linkup get trampled during the gold rush toward any new technology, and perhaps established service providers such as Amazon are going through growing pains. It’s still too early for these events to be anything other than a possible warning sign.

But things have sure looked ugly lately.

EMC gives LifeLine consumer storage product a facelift

In the course of observing the festivities on NetApp and EMC blogs, I came across a sneaky little blog post/announcement from EMC about its LifeLine consumer storage product. According to The Storage Anarchist (aka Barry Burke), his post will be the only official announcement from EMC about LifeLine 1.1.

I’ve given up on trying to understand software release-numbering, btw. Sometimes it’s a “dot-oh” release for new OS support. Other times it’s a “dot one” for, say, Linux, Mac and NFS support, Active Directory integration, RAID 0, an embedded search engine, and oh, yeah, drive spin-down in a consumer NAS box.

But from Burke’s perspective as a guinea pig user of the product, maybe this release isn’t so significant. At the very least, it hasn’t checked off all the items on his wish list, including integration with Mozy similar to what was announced for Iomega hard drives last week, better TiVo integration and dedupe.

Apple’s move away from hardware lock-in to low-cost generic arrays is a shrewd one

I’ve been seeing the scuttlebutt about Apple and Promise Technology and couldn’t help but add my two cents about how many Promise arrays I’ve seen pop up lately.

Last week, while installing our IBM N-series, I saw a couple of admins installing a multi-shelf Promise array. Peering through the cages in one of our colo areas, I’ve seen quite a few Promise and generic arrays installed. Walking the aisles in the areas I have access to, I’ve seen a rapid uptick in the installation of Off-Broadway-brand array vendors.

We own a small (5TB) Promise V-Track array we use for limited duty validation and testing (we bought it before the Storevault was released). I like it — it certainly fills the need and it does what it’s supposed to do. I can buy any brand and size SATA hard drive I want and the management tools come with the product at no additional charge. I was able to set it up in about 30 minutes and after the drive initialization (took close to 24! hours) I was all set and ready to go, all without a PhD. I even did the guy thing and didn’t read the instructions! I don’t know about you, but I can’t really ask for more, considering the price.

I’ve seen the folks at Apple accused of being stupid or lacking foresight in the past (Steve, I’m still upset about my Newton!!). In recent years, the accusers have usually been dining on crow, given the fact that Apple’s products consistently create trends. (Anyone up for an iDog?) I firmly believe they know something about the trend towards lower-cost generic arrays using generic disks in generic trays, otherwise (at least in my mind anyway), a company that prides itself on solidly locking you into their hardware when you use their software would have gone with a more mainstream storage vendor, or simply re-branded something and inserted a v-chip.

You’ve read me typing this for a couple of blog posts now, but I’ll type it again: Small to midsized SANs for under $50,000 with simple software and easy to use interfaces are going to be the market in the coming years. I’ll go a step further and say the days of proprietary drive trays and “enterprise-class ” drives are numbered too.

I seem to recall another big vendor that often gets maligned for lacking foresight snapping up a low-cost storage array vendor recently.

More importantly, Apple knows how to make difficult things easy and stylish. Not to mention that people who OEM for Apple (Foxconn , Acer et al.) are quite happy pumping out the iWhatever. It wouldn’t be too far-fetched to see Promise doing the same.

If there was ever a company that could pull off making a product that does easy data migration … see where I’m going with this?

Couple Apple’s really-easy-to-use SAN software with low-cost generic arrays and you could have a quick rise to major player in the storage software market. . .for a company many thought would be out of business by now, bringing in another company that “real” storage vendors look down their nose at.

Okay, so where’s the SMB data migration already?

Don’t know if I can compete with militant dolphins and black holes that eat France, but I’m going to give it a shot.

First, I need to define constraints before we dig into the meat: What I consider a small to medium-sized business (SMB) is a company that would have a problem justifying a $50,000 purchase for a product that would perform a migration then have no use for it for 3 to 5 years until they migrate again, or have one to two IT people doing the work, or think a SAN is just a typo for SAN-D that you’d find at a beach. I know IBM, Sun, Symantec et al. have migration services but I’m looking at the smaller business space where people need to store more on tighter budgets that were small to begin with.

We’ve recently upgraded our SAN infrastructure and while our data migration chores aren’t all that intense, I’d still prefer that a computer did it. I’ve built some tools to handle my cleanup work (I’ll share them as soon as some bugs are worked out) but only because I couldn’t easily buy something to do the same or better. Now I’ll admit that sometimes I can be blind or ignorant (or both), but I’ve noticed a HUGE gap in the availability of migration tools for the lower end of the SMB spectrum. With me being a part of The Matrix like I am, or akin to Mr. Universe from Serenity, one would think I’d have caught a whiff of something significant.

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