Google gets closer to Diomede Storage pricing

We’ve received quite of bit of email from Google’s recent announcement of reduced storage prices for their Gmail and Picassa services:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/twice-storage-for-quarter-of-price.html

https://www.google.com/accounts/PurchaseStorage

This has led to a number of comparisons with Diomede Storage’s industry leading pricing:

http://www.diomedestorage.com

I realize some companies love to spin any news into good news for their business, but I actually think this does help Diomede.

First, Diomede does not compete with Gmail or Picassa. We’re an enterprise cloud storage service to store, backup, or archive any data type with a 100% complete API (via REST, SOAP, WCF interfaces) that enables nearly any type of application to be built on top of Diomede. Gmail and Picassa are obviously specific applications that support particular data types and as such also have limited methods to upload and download that stored data. Diomede has no such limits.

(Arguably, Gmail and Picassa do compete with some of our potential customers’ consumer applications (e.g. companies building photo backup applications on top of Diomede) and hopefully Google’s announcement will push more of those companies to choose Diomede so they can stay price and capacity competitive.)

Second, one of the most common concerns we get from potential new customers is how can we be so much less expensive than competitors (more than 5 TIMES less expensive than Amazon S3 for backup data) but still offer a high-quality service. So it’s great to see another service offering competitive storage rates. Gmail & Picassa are now at $0.021/month; Diomede is still as low as $0.006/month.

It’s not that Diomede is so inexpensive; it’s that competitors, like Amazon S3, Rackspace, and EMC are so expensive. $0.15/GB/mo (Amazon S3′s storage rate) was marginally competitive 3 years ago, today it’s not, and Google’s announcement has helped emphasize that.

DioCLI Replication Policy demo

We’ve had several inquiries on how to use the Diomede Storage Replication Policies lately, so here’s a quick example and we’ll update the technical documentation shortly.

This example uses DioCLI (a command line interface to Diomede) to:

1. Create a 2nd Replication Policy (the 1st having been created by default when the account was created)
2. Set that new Replication Policy to be the default (so all new uploads will have this Replication Policy assigned)
3. Upload a new file
4. get the file properties for that file to see that the new default Replicaiton Policy was applied.

The new policy created specifies only that 3 copies are made on Diomede Offline Storage. So, what happens is all new uploads arrive at Online Storage, but then the Replication Policy is applied within minutes which:

(a) creates 3 new copies of the file on Offline Storage (for lower cost and power consumption)
(b) deletes the original 1 Online copy.

Using DioCLI to create a new default Replication Policy

Western Digital Ship 2.5″ 1 TB hard drives (PCWorld)

Sweet! Small form factor 1 TB drives are on their way, and to be tested in new Diomede Storage servers shortly.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/169095/western_digital_ships_1tb_laptop_hard_drive.html

(Note: we never make any significant changes to production hardware without a comprehensive testing stage, so if these drives pass, it will still be several months until production data (your files!) are stored on them.)

Breaking news: storage is faster and cheaper

Despite the sarcastic headline, we’re always overly excited to learn about new storage technologies:

Intel boosts speed, cuts prices of solid-state drives
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10291582-64.html

Greening the Internet: How much CO2 does this article produce?

Nice to see some mainstream media coverage of the major data center power consumption and pollution problems we are all facing:

Greening the Internet: How much CO2 does this article produce?

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/07/10/green.internet.CO2/index.html

Note: the text of that article (7,684 bytes) consumes only 0.01003 microwatts of power when backed up on Diomede (about 60 times less than a convention storage system).

Every little bit does add up (pun intended :)).

FreeDOS turns 15 today

Neat – FreeDOS turns 15 today:

http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?thread_id=3315853&forum_id=971311

I picked it up from here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8wed3/freedos_turns_15_years_old_today/

I suppose we should release our DOS Diomede client, huh? :) (really)

1996 Press Release

I realize there are countless articles like this out there, but this one seemed pretty funny since it was “only” 13 years ago…

http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/96legacy/releases.96/14362.html

SIX terabytes! :)

Diomede Storage and Cloudfront now both support request logging

Amazon recently announced they have added request logging to Cloudfront.

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/05/amazon-cloudfront-request-logging.html

This functionality, and more, is also available with Diomede Storage. Some of the related Diomede service calls to check out are:

• SearchDownloadLog
• SearchUploadLog
• SearchLoginLog
• SearchFilesTotalLog

Here’s a quick screenshot of these calls used from diocli (from a small test account I just created, all default parameters used for each call):

These are also the calls used to generate the graphs in DioMonitor:

Happy graphing!

Blow up a safe?

Crazy, I didn’t think stuff like this really happened…

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,,25299140-5013040,00.html?from=public_rss

Archivd post about cloud vendor lock in

Here is a good blog post on Archivd about cloud vendor lock in:

http://blog.archivd.com/1/post/2009/04/the-clouds-hidden-lock-in-latency.html

This is a good issue to raise and is an important reminder why you should choose a cloud storage vendor that provides easy mechanisms to physically export your data in bulk, avoiding any network limitations. Diomede’s bulk import and export functionality enables just this.

Diomede Storage is going to keep your business because we have the best service and the best solution for you – we’re not going to “hold your data hostage” for technical reasons or otherwise. If you ever need to get all your data out for whatever reason, it’s yours and we can ship it to you in bulk very quickly. Regardless of how much you love Diomede, we understand that things come up – acquisitions, partnerships, legal regulations, etc – that you’ll need to be able to handle.

As a side technical note: the author is saying this is due to network “latency”. While the latency to access “hosted clouds” (like Diomede) is higher than private clouds or services on your LAN, network latency is not specifically the reason it’s difficult to transmit large amounts of data to or from clouds – it’s typically due to the max throughput of the client (i.e. the size of their pipe to the Internet). It is possible to achieve high data transfer rates over high latency connections and a number of companies (one example) have developed protocols to tackle this problem. But regardless of the technical reason, it’s a good issue to bring up.