Why Cloud Storage Is Lousy For Enterprises (and Individuals)

storagedude points to this article at Enterprise Storage Forum which argues that cloud-based storage options have fatal limitations for both businesses and individuals: "The article makes the argument that high volumes of data and bandwidth limitations make external cloud storage all but useless for enterprises because it could take months to restore the data in a disaster. It also appears to be a consumer problem — the author spent three months replicating 1TB of home data via cable modem to an online backup service." Seems like those off-site incremental storage firms could dispatch a station wagon full of tapes, for enough money. Update: Here's another reason, for Sidekick users: reader 1ini was one of several to point out an alert from T-Mobile that "...personal information stored on your device — such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos — that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger."

Comments

Some of them do

[jimicus]

Seems like those off-site incremental storage firms could dispatch a station wagon full of tapes, for enough money.

Some of them do, for exactly that reason. MozyPro, for one.

i will keep my files locally

[FudRucker]

its too cheap and easy to keep my files locally (more dependable too)

usb thumbdrives, CDr & DVDr even harddrives are large and cheap (both external & external)

i see cloud computing as someone with a bunch of servers owned by somebody that has run out of ideas for making money, and/or with a nose for snooping in to other people's data (i bet the government likes that - the snooping part)

Re:i will keep my files locally

[mysidia]

One of the reasons you backup files is to protect against local disaster.

An example would be the building burning down. Your USB thumbdrives won't protect against that, unless you have a remote place to stash them.

Transporting physical storage devices around is risky: there is a cost of transportation, plus they could get damaged, lost, or stolen in transport.

If the physical location isn't far enough, one disaster could effect both locations.

E.g. an earthquake could effect both places in your area you might want to store the backups.

Re:i will keep my files locally

[LurkerXXX]

The cloud is good for having an additional remote backup for things small enough to restore quickly (after heavily encrypting of course). Don't forget you should have offsite backups of things you really want/need to keep, in case your place gets robbed, burned down, flooded, etc.

Re:i will keep my files locally

[LVSlushdat]

Thats why I rsync my approx 12GB of data, stuff that changes all the time, nightly to another machine here in the house, and to a USB drive, then once a week, I do an incremental of the second machine's copy to Amazon S3 using Jungledisk... For what I paid for Jungledisk ($20 one-time) and the recurring costs to Amazon (usually under $2.00/mo, depending on how much more I've uploaded and the transfer/requests charges).. That way, I lose the harddrive on my main machine, the most I've lost is one day, and if the house goes up in smoke, the most I've lost is one week. Jungledisk/Amazon S3 beats the hell out of Mozy/MozyPro/Carbonite, neither of which can run on Linux (Jungledisk *can*).

Re:i will keep my files locally

[cortesoft]

So you have to physically open the safe every time you want to back up you data? That sounds like quite a bit of a hassle to me, and I can imagine you start skipping days because you it is too much work to open the black box, take out the hard drive, connect it, run the back up, put the drive back in the safe, and lock it back up... with an online backup, your backups can take place automatically every couple of hours without having to physically move anything.

Also, what happens if the black box is stolen?

Re:i will keep my files locally

[Mr. Freeman]

A solution that I've heard of is storing a backup in a safe deposit box in a bank. If your data is stolen from a bank safe deposit box, you've got more problems than the missing data. Suppose that you could only really store weekly backups there unless you want to go to the bank every day. Put two hard drives in the box. When you put one in with your weekly backup, take out the one for the previous week.
Nightly backups could be stored locally.

I never trusted the whole cloud thing

[Ralph Spoilsport]

With storage stupid cheap, and computers continuing to increase in power, I just never saw the advantage to cloud storage. It requires web access. It's slow.

I just bought a terabyte drive for $100 to back up the other terabyte drive I bought several months ago for $160. Now everything is backed up in multiple. And I can access it without getting online. And I don't have to worry about my cloud storage company going out of business and taking all my data with it.

RS

Re:I never trusted the whole cloud thing

[Shadow of Eternity]

A bunch of DVDs, a terabyte hdd or two, dead tree editions of important documents, and a small safe deposit box.

Re:I never trusted the whole cloud thing

[tomhudson]

And if your house burns down, you're screwed.

Seems to me that if his house burns down, he's screwed even if his terabyte of pr0n is backed up "in the cloud somewhere."

Why? He'd just restore it from where it is. Might take a little while, but better than losing it (assuming it's something that matters, not pr0n).

He's GOT NO FUCKING HOUSE! How is that *not* screwed?

Or is he going to restore his house "from the cloud?"

The cloud is a dumb idea. It was originally supposed to be everyone's computer, as a distributed system, not some client-server shit that these companies are trying to intermediate themselves into as a substitute for coming up with something better.

In other words, your computer and thousands of others would devote some bandwidth and storage to backing up chunks of each other's data, sharing where appropriate, making available to the wolrd+dog where appropriate. Files that you want backed up would be broken up into redundant little pieces, and distributed among your peers, and in return, you'd do the same for others.

When it comes time to restore, you'd restore from the various chunks out there, and since there's lots of redundancy, and lots of bandwidth (since each box is only contributing a small chunk), restores would be as fast as your downlink.

Instead, the cloud has been taken from its' natural setting by companies who want to be for-profit gate-keepers, even though, by their very nature, they will do a worse job (less redundancy, not geographically spread out, etc.)

The web really should become read/write, like it was supposed to be in its' original design.

Re:I never trusted the whole cloud thing

[swillden]

Also, in case you haven't read the full sumamry - note this big failure of offsite storage: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/10/t-mobile-sidekick-disaster-microsofts-servers-crashed-and-they-dont-have-a-backup/

Offsite is pointless. Cloud is pointless. Local is GOD.

Good link, wrong conclusion.

Offsite is important, and REDUNDANCY is critical.

sigh...

[wizardforce]

the author spent three months replicating 1TB of home data via cable modem to an online backup service.

Surely the 100$ the author "saved" by doing that could not have been worth the three months it took? That's about 140 kbps... You could buy yourself a 100$ TB drive and have a local system set to back up and restore your data whenever you need and it won't take 3 months for the data to get there and back. *And* you have control over your data and its security. *And* it would probably be cheaper anyway in the end.

Fundamental Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this necessarily a fundamental problem or just an artifact of current systems? Seems like in the short term, this is correct, but in the long term, this sort of thing will disappear.

Amazon already addressed ths problem

[Unknown Relic]

For a while now they've had their AWS Import/Export service. It's still in beta and only available to people in the US, but it won't stay that way forever.

http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

Need to transfer 1TB of data? Mail Amazon the data on a drive, they load it, send you the device back. Sure beats uploading for 3 month with a cable modem. Have more data than that? You can send them up to an 8U drive enclosure, and more than that if you make special arrangements.

Cloud computing providers

[jamesl]

Boeing and Airbus are the worlds largest suppliers of cloud computing and have proven to be very reliable. Crashes are infrequent and while they can be disasterous for those directly involved they are a very small fraction of all customers. Generally replacements are on line the next day.

Re:The idea is sound. The implimentation is f---ed

[Anonymous Coward]

In my area, Comcast has 3 tiers: 1. Economy: 1/0.3 for $24/mo 2. Performance: 15/3 for $42/mo 3. Blast: 20/4 for $52/mo 4. Ultra: 30/7 for $62/mo 5. Extreme: 50/10 for $100/mo

Well in my area, people know how to count.

DRBD - the author did it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

"the author spent three months replicating 1TB of home data via cable modem to an online backup service."

What a waste of time and effort. There's a simpler way, but it depends on your provider.

All the author had to do was to set up DRBD on his VM. DRBD supports "truck mode" (as in never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes - or USB keys, for you young ones).

Just have the cloud provider set up a USB key, and sync it up with DRBD. Then have the cloud provider Fed-Ex the USB key. Amazon will do this; I don't know about other providers. Once you have the USB key, just sync it back up with DRBD.

I absolutely amazes me of all the bright people who are using cloud services (including PhD's doing research) overlook this simple method.

Save your bandwidth for the updates. Do the heavy lifting with the tools that are out there.

Individuals' Solutions are Simple

[coaxial]

Just buy an 2TB drive and stick in a drawer at work.

I have a friend that signed up for some cloud storage backup and spent months backing up his less than a terabyte. Such a sucker.

T-Mobile Sidekick Press Release

[mr_lizard13]

All your data are lost by us.

My argument against cloud storage: Bell is my ISP

[Interoperable]

They charge $2.50/GB if you go over your monthly transfer limit. If I lost my data and needed to replace it quickly (assuming I for some reason chose to back up multimedia in the cloud and then suddenly needed all my DVDs at once) it would cost considerably more than buying a highly redundant RAID array.

All your data belongs

[AHuxley]

to anyone who can out code MS...
From modem using UFO hunters to Russians with adsl, to grandmas with FTTH.
MS failed with your desktop, failed with the net, failed in London, and now you want to trust them with your personal data on the net ???