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MillimeterIs the Cloud for You?
Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
Writer/Director Thomas Mignone employed Nirvanix’s Storage Delivery Network to promote the worldwide launch of his first full-length feature film On The Doll. The film’s official website provides trailers and other content that originates from Nirvanix’s global cluster of storage-delivery nodes across North America, Europe, and Asia.
Will you be investing in cloud storage in 2009? This new trend of using the Internet for storage could save you money even as the economy turns down.
Cloud storage joins cloud computing as one of the hot business opportunities for today's Internet. Both technologies virtualize standard physical assets such as storage arrays and computers, using the Internet to allow a local resource — your computer — to act as a gateway to seemingly infinite storage or computing power.
Cloud-computing plays such as Google Docs duplicate many of the capabilities of Microsoft Office on your desktop. Microsoft itself recently announced Azure, which will provide developers who want to write apps that run in a remote datacenter with computing power and a set of tools. At a developers' conference in October, Microsoft's Ray Ozzie, chief software architect, said the company is overhauling the way it sells software as rivals to offer more ways for businesses to store and manipulate their data on the Internet.
Cloud storage, meanwhile, can make fiscal sense if you're running a small business. A recent survey by research firm IDC stated that demand for online storage services is very strong in firms that are facing budgetary and IT staffing pressures. So instead of worrying where you'll find the money to buy a couple racks of storage arrays as your business grows, maybe it's time to consider an online storage solution such as that offered by Amazon. Its online storage web service, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), provides unlimited storage through a web services interface the company describes as simple to use — no heavy-duty coding needed here. Launched in March 2006, the service has been growing quickly, in part due to the trust that people put in a name as recognized as Amazon. Users are charged $0.15 per gigabyte per month, with additional charges for bandwidth used in sending and receiving data.
If Amazon's S3 interface still looks intimidating — you still have to know your way around Unix shell commands — companies are at hand that offer more straightforward approaches. Jungle Disk employs S3, yet it offers a simpler point-and-click GUI that's available for Mac, Windows, and Linux users. The app includes an automatic backup system and can function as a network drive that you can access from multiple machines. Users — who pay a flat fee for the Jungle Disk app — are billed directly by Amazon in a pay-as-you-go model, so you aren't forced to buy into tiers of storage and pay for what you're not using, a model some companies adopt.
Worried about security? Jungle Disk implements the same info security features as Amazon's S3: You choose a custom encryption key so that all of your data is encrypted before it leaves your computer and stays encrypted while stored.
Now, with an eye toward emerging revenue streams, another cloud-storage startup — Nirvanix — has added video distribution options to its Storage Delivery Network (SDN), delivering fast-loading, higher-quality audio and video files such as HD content across the mainstream Internet.
The terms can get confusing, but an SDN such as Nirvanix isn't in business to compete with a content delivery network (CDN) such as those of Akamai or Limelight Networks — huge networks that specialize in moving bits, not storing them. When streaming requests move northward of 1,000 concurrent users, Nirvanix recommends moving the files to a CDN.
This past summer, Doom used Nirvanix as the integrated promotional platform launch of its first full-length feature film On The Doll, which is available on the film's official website (onthedoll.com). Writer/Director Thomas Mignone claims that a typical CDN would have cost upwards of $15,000 a month — too much for his promo budget — but Nirvanix could deliver the results he wanted for “well under $500 a month.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.