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Netscape Alums Tackle Cloud Storage

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the put-it-in-there dept.

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."

62 comments

  1. Privacy oriented paranoia by megrims · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This service looks immensely useful, especially for smaller businesses without the capabilities required to manage their data-storage and back-up needs.

    But still, I feel uneasy about the idea of having my data out of my immediate control in the long term, which is my primary qualm about the whole cloud-computing concept.

    1. Re:Privacy oriented paranoia by cybrthng · · Score: 4, Informative

      Through their marketing speak it doesn't look like they're targeting the small business sectory. Even their TCO demo starts out at 10tb and their cost per terabyte is 2,500 if that 2.50/gig is correct. 10 tb for 25,000 doesn't sound terribly bad but by the time you figure integration costs is it really saving you? From my perspective cloud storage is fine for an archival/repository situation in which cases you will find hardware based solutions that are very easily self managed from EMC/Clarrion that do this and probably even cheaper and automagically with cool applications to handle it all.

    2. Re:Privacy oriented paranoia by alen · · Score: 1

      does this $2.50/gig include backup costs so that if you need data from say 9 months ago they can recover it for you?

      everyone can do DR backups, most of the data restores where i work are due to missing data in archive databases and we need to find the raw data again from several years back

    3. Re:Privacy oriented paranoia by Forge · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What about a private cloud?

      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?

      --
      --= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
    4. Re:Privacy oriented paranoia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      My first thought would be the Andrew File System. It's an old protocol/file system for distributed storage and caching.

      But in such a configuration, where your failure rate increases, you'd want to ensure all data is replicated across multiple machines. AFS couldn't do that last time I looked. Ditributed caches would be invalidated on a write, so you'd get a single copy in the cloud until someone else tried to read the file.

    5. Re:Privacy oriented paranoia by haeger · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Something like this? http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe

      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.

      --
      You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
    6. Re:Privacy oriented paranoia by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 1

      $25,000 for 10 TB of disk storage? That's outrageously expensive. Considering it's "in the cloud", you'll be limited to whatever your Internet connection is for throughput. Unless you have a couple of massive fibre links, with very few hops between you and "the cloud", performance will suck.

      For $10,000 CDN ($8,000 US) you can put together a 10 TB storage box using multiple 3Ware RAID controllers (or even just plain SATA controllers), 24x 500 GB SATA drives, a 5U rackmount case, redundant power supplies, and quad-port NIC, using FreeBSD or OpenSolaris with ZFS.

      Export zvols using iSCSI to use it as a SAN, or export zfs filesystems using CIFS or NFS to use it as NAS.

      Need more space, then just replace the 500 GB drives with larger ones as needed, and the zpool expands out to use the extra space.

      Need off-site storage? Build two servers, and configure rsync to run everyday. If they ever fix the performance issues, you could even use the zfs snapshot send/recv to keep the servers in sync. It'd still be cheaper than their $25,000.

      And the performance will be a hell of a lot better.

    7. Re:Privacy oriented paranoia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually their starting price is $0.25 per gig , so that's $250/tb.

      The TCO calculater is asking for your current storage cost per gig.

    8. Re:Privacy oriented paranoia by storagedude · · Score: 1

      They seem to have better than average data integrity and protection, FWIW. http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/ipstorage/news/article.php/3813921

  2. Okay, there's half of the problem with the Cloud! by morgan_greywolf · · 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.

    --
    My blog
  3. Cloud Storage .... by JasterBobaMereel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Cloud storage, also known as "give us your companies confidential data, and we will look after it and not look at it, honest...."

    --
    Puteulanus fenestra mortis
    1. Re:Cloud Storage .... by Atzanteol · · Score: 2, Insightful

      That's why the FSM created encryption.

      --
      "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

      - Charles Darwin
    2. Re:Cloud Storage .... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Parent has a point.

      A little birdie told my back in early 2006 google was looking at an online file storage service, but had privacy concerns. Last I heard they were working on a java applet to encrypt your data clientside, before it's sent to google. The whole process would be pretty much transparent to the user.

      No clue what came of it, obviously the product hasn't launched.

    3. Re:Cloud Storage .... by Repossessed · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I've never really seen the privacy thing as an issue.

      Just encrypt the data on its way out the door, keep a backup of the decryption keys in a safe deposit box or with your lawyers (if you can trust your lawyer, or your bank, that is.)

      --
      Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
    4. Re:Cloud Storage .... by JasterBobaMereel · · Score: 1

      So you think using an applet provided by them leaves them with no possibility of allowing them to unencrypt the data ....

      Yes I do sound paranoid, but if my data is important to my business then I have a right to be ...

      --
      Puteulanus fenestra mortis
    5. Re:Cloud Storage .... by LaurensVH · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you don't encrypt confidential data with keys not given to everyone in your company, let alone people in *OTHER* companies, you deserve to have all your corporate data stolen.

    6. Re:Cloud Storage .... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Aka, box backup

    7. Re:Cloud Storage .... by Richard_at_work · · Score: 1

      This isn't new - data vaulting has been around for quite some time and is highly popular, especially in the disaster recovery arena.

    8. Re:Cloud Storage .... by FishOuttaWater · · Score: 1

      What drives me crazy about all this is that a company I worked at did this stuff right in the 90's including data reduction, compression, encryption, and bare-metal restore. Somehow they didn't make fabulous amounts of money from it and make my stock options worth millions. (Ok, it was backup to a server instead of to the cloud, but that's hardly a leap.) Now we talk about this concept like it's a radical future thing, which it still is, and I'm mystified as to why. Alas! Here I am still working for a living *and* looking for a good backup application with DR. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,8927,00.asp

  4. "Coming from Netscape"... not that good PR by doktorstop · · Score: 3, Funny

    Might work unless they keep the Netscape logo :)
    A green monster eating a planet would do them pretty poor PR

    --
    http://www.automatiq.se
    1. Re:"Coming from Netscape"... not that good PR by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 1

      [green monster logo here]
      Zetta: We munch your data in the cloud!

      or

      [green monster logo here]
      Zetta: All your delicious data are belong to us!

      --
      My blog
  5. 11M enough? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Don't think 11M is really enough in funding, do you? Only taking on Amazon, Microsoft...everyone else....

  6. Re:Okay, there's half of the problem with the Clou by AlterRNow · · Score: 3, Funny

    repeating the same mistakes

    At my workplace, we call that progress!
    ( Sadly, I do not jest :'( )

    --
    The disappearing pencil trick. Let me show you it.
  7. ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Given that a lot of ISPs seem to be heading toward a monthly quota model, all this "cloud storage" thing seems to be the wrong way to handle your data IMHO.

    1. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by onion2k · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Storing your data in "the cloud" isn't really for home users, the advantages are minimal. It's for businesses who would normally incur massive bandwidth costs but instead are able to take advantage of the huge economies of scale a cloud vendor can provide.

      A typical example is Twitter - all the user assets like avatars are hosted on Amazon's S3 service. That means Twitter doesn't have to pay for all that bandwidth, storage server space, redundant capacity, etc. They just pay a monthly fee that's far less per gigabyte than if they did it in-house. The disadvantage is that it ties them to Amazon.

      I suspect that there'll be a few cloud vendors that sink in the next couple of years because they're not good enough to compete. Personally, I'd be wary of using one with only $11m in fund capital. It sounds a lot, but it's not. They could burn through that in months trying to market their service (against competition like Amazon and Google no less), and be left with no money having shut up shop, at which point all their existing clients would have a hell of a time migrating to another provider. They clearly have the technical ability to build a working service, but whether they have the ability to turn that into a service that will last in the market place is a whole different ball game.

      That said, if I was researching a vendor to go with, I'd obviously read up on who else is with them on the non-technical side. They've got this far. That's more than a fair few others.

      --
      http://twitter.com/onion2k
    2. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by wjh31 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Given that alot of things seem to be headed into the cloud, all this "monthly quota" thing seems to be the wrong way to handle your bandwidth IMHO

    3. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by NetRAVEN5000 · · Score: 1

      If you are a business (which you most likely are if you're even considering "cloud storage") then you're probably going to pay for a provider that doesn't have these quotas - either that or you'll figure that a safe data backup is worth the cost.

      --
      www.linuxpenguin.net
    4. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by Yvan256 · · Score: 1

      Except that in a lot of places, you don't even have a choice for ISP.

      But yeah, I also think that monthly quotas are the wrong idea. Then again, when you see the price/GB that some ISPs charge you when you go over the limit, that's even more insane.

    5. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by Angostura · · Score: 1

      Storing your data in "the cloud" isn't really for home users, the advantages are minimal.

      With all due respect that's entirely wrong. Me, my friends and family all backup our photos and bits and bobs on Mozy or Dropbox or whatever as well as on an external drive precisely because it gives us an easy cheap method of off-site storage. Yes "cloud" storage may prove unreliable. But all I need to know is that either my external hard drive or the cloud-based data set is available on the day that my hard drive goes phoom.

    6. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by Max_W · · Score: 1

      I bought a hard drive which is connected to my home LAN via network cable. It is actually a device Linux system with Samba server. But in the home LAN it is visible just like a Windows network drive.

      It is small and silent as it does not have a fan. It is in an aluminum casing, so it is silent and fast.

      500 GB at your fingertips, my wireless LAN is 300 MB/s. There is already 1 GB model.

      Why would I need a cloud storage for photos and movies?

    7. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by coryking · · Score: 1

      The thing about S3 is it their pricing structure is almost too granular. I mean, S3 charges $0.01 per 10,000 GET's in addition to the data transferred per request. Their EC2 charges $0.10 per 1 million I/O requests.

      I mean, those numbers sound small, but even I have no clue how many IO requests I am making right now... is ten cents per million a good price or a bad price? Dunno! Is a penny per 10,000 GET's a good price? Probably--that is ten bucks for 10 million requests, right?

      The disadvantage is that it ties them to Amazon.

      Sure it ties them to Amazon, but how tightly? I mean, as a percentage of their codebase, there is probably what, 0.5% specific to Amazon? And codebase aside, how hard is it to migrate your data from one cloud to another? I mean, at most it is a month long project and most of that is probably testing and dealing with unexpected edge cases. But none of these cloud guys do anything that really tie you in any more than a regular host.

      BTW--I was looking at the URL structure of twitter and I tell you, if I was to use S3, I wouldn't tolerate the URL's for my images looking like this:
      http://s3.amazonaws.com/twitter_production/profile_images/120987937/twitter_photo_bigger.jpg

      That URL looks really unprofessional for such a big player. Can't they at least get their own hostname? It does prove my point though--about the only cost to migrate is changing the "upload avatars" code and changing the template to use a new URL structure.

    8. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by Max_W · · Score: 1

      Rather: 1 TB model (in my previous post).

    9. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by AvitarX · · Score: 2, Informative

      I hope your house stays secure.

      A good cloud service does 2 things:
      1) it provides reliable off-site backup to protect from theft, fire, flooding or other things that destroy all copies in a single location

      2) It helps protect against bit-rot. Having 2 live copies at home can help with this too, as if your appliance fails, you can get a new one and back up, of your desktop fails, the same. Though a random company with $11 million is probably more susceptible to company rot, than my USB hard drive is to bit rot.

      I also will say this, I have a network appliance, and i only get 2MB/s off of it over the network. That means to fully backup the full TB of data will take me six days, of course this applies to the cloud too most likely.

      --
      Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
    10. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by Max_W · · Score: 1

      Good point about physical security. I know a case when both a notebook and backup drive were stolen from an apartment at the same time.

    11. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by guruevi · · Score: 1

      Well, at some point it's cheaper to do it in-house anyway. Maybe not for online interconnected services like Twitter, but especially for primary enterprise data (what they're targeting) you need fast, available access to data locally, the web only makes it more difficult to get it fast and available.

      I don't even know if Twitter has the advantage of scale anymore. The advantage of scale only comes in where you xx% of a given capacity over 3-5 years but need 100% of the infrastructure to provide that xx%. At a certain point, the markup of the vendor and the disadvantages of the centralization (especially with storage, larger amounts of data increase the price of the storage infrastructure instead of decreasing it) and delays associated with that vendor exceeds that price.

      Storage is cheap and even in the semi-enterprise field (100TB over FibreChannel) it's cheaper to invest in it locally and have a decent admin to handle your needs. Over 100TB it's probably going to be cheaper to use that service (if they themselves already have the PB infrastructure) but at that time it's not feasible anymore to move that amount of data into the 'cloud'. You'll also have issues with liability if the data ever gets lost. I would only use these services if you can't afford your own 'live' offsite backups.

      --
      Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
    12. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Dropbox isn't "cloud" storage in the same was Amazon is. Think distributed replication. Amazon has servers all over the world. You put your large files/images on Amazons service. If a browser is requesting a file from your website that is stored in Amazon's cloud the file will be sent from a server closest to the customer. So if your website has worldwide appeal or just occasional MASSIVE traffic you can handle the slash-dotting fine, because the important large files aren't being hosted by your cheap website from your single site.

    13. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by Makoss · · Score: 1

      I mean, those numbers sound small, but even I have no clue how many IO requests I am making right now... is ten cents per million a good price or a bad price? Dunno! Is a penny per 10,000 GET's a good price? Probably--that is ten bucks for 10 million requests, right?

      It can add up fast.

      My company provides an offsite backup solution, and we've been using S3 as our primary storage backend since a few months after S3 went live. It is not unusual for us that the per-op costs are greater than the actual data storage or transfer costs. It is worth noting however that our use of S3 is quite non-standard. We do some pretty extensive verification to catch bitrot should it ever occur, as well as some fairly convoluted data processing to minimize actual transfer overhead for updated files.

      So the answer is that it really depends. If you just throw data up there all at once and hope it sticks, those additional costs won't matter. However, if you want to build something more complicated that doesn't just blindly trust S3, or that does efficient data updating, then yes, those costs do matter quite a lot.

      --
      Building a better backup.
      Zettabyte Storage
    14. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by phoenix_rizzen · · Score: 1

      And when your house burns down, turning that nice little NAS box into charcoal, what then? ;)

      Or, if someone breaks into the house and takes the NAS box along with the computer?

      There's a reason for having off-site backups, whether it be a box discs in the safe deposit box, a removable drive at a friend's, stuck into your gmail account, or somewhere "in the cloud". Just so long as it's not right next to the device it's backing up. :)

    15. Re:ISPs, bandwidth and quotas by Angostura · · Score: 1

      Why would I need a cloud storage for photos and movies?

      Because one day your house may either burn down or get burgled. Basically the same reasons that anyone ever uses off-site storage.

  8. Link by Any+Web+Loco · · Score: 5, Informative
    Would it have killed you to put a link to the firm in the blurb?

    http://www.zetta.net/

  9. Are they going to call it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    ....Zetta File System?

    ZFS sounds like a good name for a file system.

  10. Alums? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2

    WTF is an alum?

    1. Re:Alums? by JasterBobaMereel · · Score: 1

      Alum -> Alumnus .... "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alumni"

      Graduate of a college (or in this case the Netscape mindset ...)

      --
      Puteulanus fenestra mortis
    2. Re:Alums? by frith01 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Poor abbreviation of Alumni , meaning a former associate, employee, member, etc...
      (or typical slashdot spelling / grammar mistake )

  11. Netscape alumnus at other startups too by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'd wager.

    What makes this one special? Or worthy of highlighting the minor fact that there are Netscape folk there?

    Given how well Netscape ultimately did, why would we expect this to do any better.

  12. They call him: by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 1

    Lou "the cookie monster" Montulli...

  13. Cookies? by danwesnor · · Score: 1, Funny

    If the guy who invented privacy-invasive web cookies thinks I'll trust him with my data, he'd better think again.

    1. Re:Cookies? by Max_W · · Score: 1

      But how implement a session without a cookie file?? No shopping basket then?? No keeping a choice until the next visit??

    2. Re:Cookies? by danwesnor · · Score: 1

      I'm not saying no cookies, but they were implemented in a way that could easily be abused. For example, there should have been a user option to auto delete all cookies when the browser closes, or after a week, or a year. We have somewhat recovered some control, but when cookies were first loosed on the world, the site developer had all the control over the cookies, not the user. Same deal with pop-up window. What Netscape thought was a cool and useful new feature was implemented in a way that was hard for the user to override, and we all wound up with a screenful of women in bikinis that we could spy on with our X-cam. Netscape was just throwing stuff out there without thinking about how it could be abused and how the implementation could prevent that abuse. And now they want all your data.

    3. Re:Cookies? by Max_W · · Score: 1

      OK. I agree in general. Still they were going ahead bravely into unknown.

      I believe it is not possible to produce an absolutely secure passive system. For example, one can break about any door or wall with a sledgehammer, or one can shoot a man in the best body armor and helmet easily.

      What prevents criminals to do it is not only the strength of the door or body armor, but laws, self defense, police, etc., i.e. active hit-back security.

      UN is doing about nothing in this direction. Spam brings billions upon billions of losses to the world economy via lost working time. Was anyone punished in Nigeria or wherever this spam is coming? Meanwhile the UN diplomats are doing nothing, while Western leaders are concentrating on very local organization like EU and NATO in the global world and forgetting about UN, which is really global organization.

  14. Not just cookies by Gerald · · Score: 2, Funny

    Another Zetta cofounder is Lou Montulli...

    We can all rest easy now. The cloud will have a "blink" tag.

    1. Re:Not just cookies by behindthewall · · Score: 1

      aka "Lightning"?

    2. Re:Not just cookies by cerberusss · · Score: 1

      We can all rest easy now. The cloud will have a "blink" tag.

      That's nice, but will it have an interval attribute?

      I would love something like <blink interval="100ms">blinkenlights</blink>

      --
      8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
  15. interoperability by fulldecent · · Score: 1

    Does it follow the S3 API? Is it cheaper? Is it reliable?

    --

    -- I was raised on the command line, bitch

  16. Re:Okay, there's half of the problem with the Clou by Vu1turEMaN · · Score: 1

    A snapshot of a cloud wouldn't do you much good, except for framing on your wall.

    However, if you developed a cloud-making machine, you could have two clouds!

  17. Re:Okay, there's half of the problem with the Clou by cryfreedomlove · · Score: 1

    So every database that is not relational sucks? Is there no application that needs non-relational object storage? You sound like a Luddite to me.

  18. Re:Okay, there's half of the problem with the Clou by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 1

    No, I'm not. I'm saying that most applications used in the enterprise, uch as CRM, SCM, and other business intelligence/analytics applications, etc. absolutely require relational databases. Flat-file databases are relics of the past, and nobody doing anything serious is going to consider them, cloud or no cloud. At all.

    --
    My blog
  19. ASS Service? by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 1

    What? It's competing with ASS service?

    --
    Support my political activism on Patreon.
  20. Re:Okay, there's half of the problem with the Clou by cryfreedomlove · · Score: 1

    What do you say to Google? They've built the most successful company of the last decade without using relational databases for their core business. Why would Google have built BigTable if 'nobody doing anything serious is going to consider them'? Is Google not serious?