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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."

19 of 62 comments (clear)

  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 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 ?
    3. 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
  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 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)
    3. 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.

  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
  5. 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.
  6. 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 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
  7. 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/

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

    WTF is an alum?

    1. Re:Alums? by frith01 · · Score: 2, Informative

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

  9. 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.