How You Know You’ve Got the Right Startup Model?
If you’ve watched any industry in the last 20 years where technology has begun to transform how the industry works the results are always predictable driven by what Clay Christensen appropriately called “The Innovator’s Dilemma” (one of the most influential books that changed my thinking about markets). Young startups claim they are going to change […]
The Case for Tiered Storage in Private Clouds
Fall of last year I wrote a controversial whitepaper detailing my concerns about how distributed storage was being marketed. The blog introduction and the whitepaper were both entitled Converged Storage, Wishful Thinking, and Reality. There was a certain amount of expected blowback from folks at RedHat and Ceph as well as more thoughtful replies from […]
Podcasting again… with StorSimple’s Marc Farley
I used to podcast pretty regularly, on this site and elsewhere. Then other things got in the way and, before I knew it, almost two years had passed since my last podcast here. Well, it’s time to put that right. I’m podcasting again, and I’ve got a nice pipeline of guests lined up over the […]
You Can’t Collapse Tiered Storage in Private Clouds Built on OpenStack: Whitepaper
Fantastical thinking by private cloud builders has led to a deep misunderstanding of cloud storage technologies. If you are building a private cloud, you MUST understand the realities of cloud storage and not just think in terms of buying a single simple solution to what is ultimately a very complex problem. I’ve written a detailed […]
Clown Computing–Entertaining and Attention Grabbing but a Flawed Thesis
Recently I attended Webstock, a conference in Wellington, New Zealand that is well known for bringing together technology, design and general brain stimulation. It was a great event, with some awesome speakers but one presentation, by Jason Scott, part of an activist preservationist group Archive Team, kind of stuck in my craw. In his presentation, […]
Sure Dropbox is Potentially Insecure, but Does it Matter?
It’s summertime down in my neck of the woods and that’s a good time to go out on a limb with a statement that might get people a little fired up. Bear with me on this one though… Over on GigaOm Barb Darrow has a good write up about the findings of a survey commissioned […]
Dropbox, Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Microsoft SkyDrive; maybe they’re not apples after all?
Cloud storage product Dropbox is one of those tools that users tend to rave about. It’s deceptively simple. It’s pretty reliable. The value proposition is immediately apparent. It has paid tiers of usage that bring additional storage but (like other freemium beacons such as Evernote) the free offering is rich enough to be compelling, engaging, […]
FileLocker Launches By Taking a Shot at Dropbox and Box
In launching FileLocker, InfraScale CEO Ken Shaw is claiming that both DropBox and Box have been “substantially misrepresenting their capabilities when it comes to security and won’t be adopted by enterprise or Government” because of it. Those are pretty strong words…
TwinStrata CloudArray Now Supports NAS for Heterogeneous Storage Management
I’ve written previously about TwinStrata – a company whose CloudArray storage gateway is designed to enable organizations to deploy cloud SANs which combine public and private cloud storage providers along with their existing storage infrastructure. It’s a logical play – while pure cloud may be the holy grail and the
On Not Forgetting to be 10x Better
I was struggling what to make of the news that now, AT&T too was jumping into the cloud storage-as-a-commodity business offering 5GB of free online storage. Just like DropBox. And Google Drive. And Box, if you use it that way. And iCloud. And SkyDrive. And. And. And. You could make fun of it, but it […]
Another Answer for a Safe Hybrid Dropbox-like Solution–MagFS Launches
Two things most enterprise IT folks agree on are that Dropbox is a risky proposition for sensitive enterprise data and that employees are demanding solutions with a “Dropbox-like” functional spec. It’s a big area of opportunity and one that companies like Egnyte and Oxygen Cloud have spent time addressing – Dropbox’s seemingly never ending security […]
Dropbox Security Issues–IT has itself to Blame
So Dropbox, the file sharing, backup and sync service that has been setting the world on fire, seems to have had some serious problems of late. It seems a large number of users have received spam e-mails and, in response, Dropbox has bought in a SWAT team of security experts
Google Cloud Storage–Enterprise Announcements Roll In from Panzura and Zmanda
We’ve been talking for years about Google offering a storage system to take on the likes of Box and DropBox. It’s an obvious development for the company who arguable has the best economics around data storage on earth. Last year we got an inkling of this direction with the release
AppSense Trying To Make Personal Clouds Enterprise Worthy
AppSense, the NewYork based company focussed on Virtualization solutions, today announced their research wing, AppSense Labs, focussed on bridging the gap between personal services and enterprise. They also announced their first product under AppSense Labs called DataLocker (iTunes link for iPad and iPhone). This got my attention for two reasons: As the so called consumerization […]
WorldDesk and DropBox Make a Truly Virtual Desktop
A few days ago a little battle raged around what the launch of Google’s GDrive product might mean for DropBox. At the time fellow Cloud watcher Alex Williams commented that DropBox has a lot of magic that would save its day – I wasn’t so sure but it’s nonetheless interesting
