August 17, 2007
Interesting post today from Robin Harris (one of the more smarter observers of the storage space) on the latest storage offering from Google mentioned in the last post…
To check it out, look here: Robin Harris on Storage Bits: Gdrive. With this trackback.
He seems baffled that as talented as the team a Google is, they aren’t really able to articulate a clear sense of what this product is and how it can be used. To us, it is relatively clear. Harris is spot on in his analysis that the “whole effort reads like a few engineers fiddling around until they got something inoffensive enough for a not-very-plugged-in committee to approve.” This is not their core business. Not even close. We aren’t surprised that it comes out this way.
As we have noted time and again, what would be great would be if Google would come out with a competitive offering to Amazon’s S3. They’d be leveraging what they really know well - how to build amazingly efficient and hugely scalable utilty systems, and would not have to do much to create enormous buzz in the development community. Moreover, instead of threatening to hurt the small companies in the storage space, they would actually be providing enormous value.
Think about Larry/Sergei…
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Posted by elephantdrive
August 10, 2007
Two big announcements from titans GOOG and MSFT are getting tepid reactions from investors, bloggers, and other sources. They both announced interesting storage initiatives this week - items that certainly capture our attention here at ElephantDrive.
Microsoft announced a name change of its Live Folders product to SkyDrive, as well as a formal beta. Google opened up some new storage service - for a fee, you can get additional storage directly linked to their applications like Gmail, Google Apps, and Picasa. Since ElephantDrive offers more storage for less money than both, and because our software offers many more features and interfaces, neither of these are particularly exciting. Hopefully, they will both serve to highlight the growing improtance of storage services.
We welcome their entrance into this space, but we really wish they would take a cue from Amazon - the only web giant doing really innovative things with web services (especially S3) - and leverage their massive investments in hardware, bandwidth, and co-location facilities to offer a compelling and inexpensive raw storage service.
Useful coverage here:
ReadWriteWeb
TechCrunch
CNN-Money
And noticed later, but definitely interesting, here:
Dennis Howlett for zdNet on Google storage
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Posted by elephantdrive
August 7, 2007
TechCrunch reported about a new storage-as-a-service provider called Nirvanix today. This is exciting news for ElephantDrive, as we are big fans of current storage-as-a-service player Amazon. ElephantDrive complements its own storage repositories with Amazon’s S3.
We won’t be embracing the newcomer just yet (the service is not yet available for public consumption), but we will certainly consider adding it to our mix when it goes live. If anyone gets a chance to try it out in beta, we’d love to hear your comments and feedback.
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Posted by elephantdrive
