Cloud Storage Comparison: Benchmarking From Afar

First time accepted submitter fasuin writes "Which is the most advanced cloud storage solution? Which is the impact of server locations? What are the benefits of advanced techniques to optimise data transfers? Researchers from Italy and The Netherlands have come out with a set of benchmarks that allowed them to compare Dropbox, CloudDrive, SkyDrive and Google Drive. Which is the best? You can check it by yourself by running the tests on your own if you like." What this kind of benchmarking can't well do, though, is predict which of these cloud storage companies are going to be around in five years, which might be at least as an important a factor.

Comments

Wrong benchmark

[0123456]

How about measuring how fast the NSA get a copy of all my stuff?

Re:Cloud...

[clj]

Yay! No more lame Anonymous Coward posts!

GlusterFS could be on this list

[purpleidea]

It's pretty awesome, and pretty cheap on $/Gb/Performance.
I'm biased because I'm the Puppet-Gluster dev.
http://ttboj.wordpress.com/puppet-gluster/

You can run GlusterFS in "cloud" or on your own iron. Because it's not proprietary, the possibilities are endless, and it has a lot of very elegant features.

HTH
Cheers

Security is NOT an issue with The Cloud.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.

The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.

And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.

My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.

Re:pretty sure

[gweihir]

Apple, Google, and in particular, MS, could just decide that they do not care about that product anymore...

Re:pretty sure

[fermion]

In fact when Apple moved to iCloud, it did not transfer data from Mobileme though there appeared to be no technical reason not to, and this was for paying customers. There was plenty of warning, but if data was not backed up it was gone.

Then there were all the accounts Google was deleting a couple years ago. They have never been of the tact that customer support, even for customers, is important. Getting back data is no their concern.

MS has not been in the free online data store biz for long. Yes they have some commercial offering, but they are only just entering the consumer space depends on the success of the new new Surface. Otherwise it will just be an MS Office feature. MS had no problem ending play for sure and all the customer data associated with it, which represented real money, not just easily backed up data.