Who needs on-site storage?
By Martha Entwistle
Updated Wed November 28, 2007
Word's getting out today about Google's plan to offer storage as a service. Clearly, this is targeted first toward the consumer market, so people can have all-the-time/everywhere access to their photos and music, either to share with Grandma or hipster friends (wallet pics and iPods just don't cut it anymore, apparently). But it's also targeted toward the burgeoning online backup industry, which makes a hell of a lot of sense.
The big question, of course, is how long it will be before everyone's storing just about everything in giant, hot-redundant storage farms, and whether the central station industry, for example, might want to get in on that as a service to provide both dealer customers and end users.
If I'm an end user, why would I want to buy a bunch of RAID storage and have it sit in a closet when I could just store all my video off-site and access it through a web browser from anywhere in the world (not that I couldn't access it from anywhere anyway, it's just now I don't have to worry about my closet flooding)?
Well, for one thing, off-site storage is still price prohibitive:
As you can see, online storage is pricey. For instance, if you bought a Maxtor OneTouch 300GB external hard drive for $296, your one-time cost would be 99 cents per gigabyte. However, if you backed up just 2GB of data to IBackup, you'd pay $162 per gigabyte.
Just think what 90 days of bank video from megapixel cameras would cost!
But it's going to get cheaper soon:
Even EMC Corp. has driven a stake into the hosted-storage landscape with its October agreement to buy start-up Berkeley Data Systems Inc. and its popular Mozy online backup business for $76 million.
So, you might want to check out a service like that being provided by OzVision as a way of moving in that direction, if you're a central station. End users just want to look at video - they don't want to have to store and keep clean and safe a bunch of humming black boxes.
Comments