Netscape Alums Tackle Cloud Storage 62
BobB-nw writes "A new cloud storage vendor is entering the market, promising an enterprise-class file system with snapshots, replication, and other features designed to simplify adoption for existing users and applications. Zetta, founded in 2007 by veterans of Netscape, has $11 million in funding and is coming out of stealth mode Monday with Enterprise Cloud Storage, a Web-based storage platform that will compete against Amazon's Simple Storage Service and a growing number of cloud vendors. Zetta's goal was to build a Web-based storage system that would be accepted by enterprise IT professionals for storing primary data. 'Data growth rates are staggering. In businesses you see growth rates of 40 to 60 percent year over year,' says CEO Jeff Treuhaft, a Zetta cofounder and formerly one of Netscape's first employees. Another Zetta cofounder is Lou Montulli, an early Netscape employee who invented Web cookies."
Okay, there's half of the problem with the Cloud! (Score:2, Interesting)
There's half of the problem with the cloud: Cloud storage platforms that suck because they aren't redundant and lack other enterprise-class features such as snapshots.
Now the second half of the problem: cloud databases that suck because they don't aren't relational and don't offer much protection against corrupt data.
Oh, and for all of this to get widespread adoption, CIOs are actually looking for these platforms to be open source and open standards so that they aren't tied to one vendor. They're not interested in repeating the same mistakes that were made with vendor lock-in in the past.
Cloud Storage .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Cloud storage, also known as "give us your companies confidential data, and we will look after it and not look at it, honest...."
Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Privacy oriented paranoia (Score:3, Interesting)
these days, the lowest cost hard drive available from major server vendors (at least Dell) is 160GB.
Meanwhile many of the server applications we use need only a small fraction of that space. What I would like to see is a software that allows me to share an arbitrary portion of the unused space on each server as part of a storage cloud.
Right now, we could squeeze out 20 or so Terabytes from the server hardware we already own and 80 unused Terabytes, just from those desktops which have to run 24/7 and have pretty locked down software configurations.
Dose anyone know where we can find a reliable and inexpensive software package to turn this unused space into a virtual SAN?
Re:Privacy oriented paranoia (Score:3, Interesting)
Something like this? http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe [allmydata.org]
Tahoe, the Least-Authority Filesystem. This is a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem. All of the source code is available under a choice of two Free Software, Open Source licences.
This filesystem is encrypted and spread over multiple peers in such a way that it continues to function even when some of the peers are unavailable, malfunctioning, or malicious.