storage as a services

There's been a lot of talk about storing our media in "the cloud" over the past few years, but not a lot of action. We've seen start-ups such as mSpot and MP3tunes tackle the music locker idea while options like SugarSync and Dropbox lure people looking for more general file backup solutions. Still, no one yet has been able to push a cloud storage service into the mainstream. With Cloud Drive, Amazon.com is hoping to change that.

The online megastore's Cloud Drive online storage service starts with a free 5GB base plan that can … Read more

Last year, storage vendors were all about cloud. They saw major-league opportunities in the private, public, hybrid, and federated versions. No cloud was too big or too small. In fact, because clouds were "infinitely scalable," there was no limit to the number of yotta bytes they could sell.

Storage users and data center storage administrators in particular were decidedly more sanguine. You say cloud is a new services delivery model? Hey storage vendors, where have you been lately? We've been all about services delivery for some time now. Tell us something about cloud we don't know. … Read more

Wayne Rosso, formerly CEO of Grokster, founder of Maxxbox, and outspoken critic of the Recording Industry Association of America, recently joined Global Gaming Factory, the soon-to-be owner of file-sharing legend The Pirate Bay.

In an interview with CNET's Digital Media blog, Rosso outlined what turns out to be an extremely innovative cloud-computing business model.

The only question is, will it work?

In the interview, Rosso outlines a plan in which The Pirate Bay customers could pay a monthly fee for music service, but could reduce that cost by contributing storage capacity to a commercially available Storage-as-a-Service offering:

For example, a person may dedicate a gig of (storage) space to the network and the fee may go from $9 to $5. (Rosso declined to discuss pricing yet so the numbers are made up just for the example).

"The more of your computer resources you contribute to the network, the less you pay down to zero," Rosso said. "The user is in control."

In other words, The Pirate Bay aims to be the first commercial peer-to-peer storage cloud that separates how capacity is acquired from how it is sold. This is extremely interesting, because it means it can sell one service to a consumer audience (music and video), and another entirely different service to business (storage services).… Read more

AT&T is expanding its cloud-computing efforts with its new Synaptic Storage as a Service offering for enterprise customers, announced Monday. The service will let business users save and access their data via laptops, smartphones, and other Web-enabled devices.

With cloud-based storage, businesses can tap into their data as a service without having to set up their own equipment. They pay a monthly fee for storage as they use it. AT&T plans to offer the service on a limited basis starting this month, with its eye on a larger rollout to its U.S. Internet data centers … Read more

You buy MP3s, take photos, write long love letters to Cloris Leachman, and you keep it all on your hard drive. If that hard drive crashes, you're done for. Unless you backed up. But what's the best way to back up? There are several ways to do this. We're going to discuss three. You can see some of them in action in our video.

Let's start with the external hard drive. Obviously, you don't want to back up to the same hard drive where the original files are. That's just silly.

The simplest method is to buy an external hard drive and back up to that. Our favorite here at CNET is the ClickFree portable backup. It makes the process of backing up as simple as you can imagine. The software is stored on the drive, so you just plug it in and tell it what to back up.

You can also do it yourself. If you have an old hard drive lying around, say from upgrading a notebook, just put it in a case. We show how to do it in this video on upgrading your hard drive.… Read more