Online Storage options

More and more companies are burdened with tons of their legacy data, archived volumes and the all-important confidential data. Having a secure storage away from the originating point, which may be connected via a high-speed network, is imperative for such companies. The same applies for people on the move and/or people wanting their data safe from prying eyes. This sort of functionality is provided by SAN infrastructures. Many companies, however, neither have the money nor the initiative to implement a SAN. A new business model came up to serve smaller sized companies or dotcoms to provide “secure” storage solutions through normal Internet connections. These companies started providing solutions that enabled storage of data on their servers, and their services were (and still are) offered to Internet users freely but with limited storage.

However, most of these companies went bust and their business models failed because of a very nagging prerequisite — broadband, and what may be called an abuse of services by the “free users”. With the steady infrastructure improvements that are now taking place, these solutions could once again gain ground. 

Implementation



Online Storage implementation presents a wide range of options from web-based interface, to Network File System (NFS). Sharemation has a Web Folders-based product, which like NFS integrates into the file system hierarchy in a very transparent manner. The other option, which may not be strictly defined by the term online storage is the Distributed File System. WebFS (www.webfs. com), a commercial product implements a Global File System that spans across platforms and geographical locations and neatly integrates into your present corporate setup. Open Source products include lustre (Linux + cluster), which aims to provide a massive amount of storage and exceptional security, in Petabytes. The first stable version is expected to be available soon and would support up to 100 TB. For more information on this, you can refer to

www.lustre.org.

Internet Data Centers (IDCs) are also, sometimes, referred to as online storage, although their functionality is not just limited to storage. IDCs are, in fact, the modern versions of data centers — which house and maintain back-end information systems such as databases. The term Internet was added to reflect the distributed (both physical and work delegation to third party) nature of such services in the present scenario.

Personal options available on the Net are extremely good and worth a try — Yahoo briefcase is perhaps the most commonly used, providing 25 MB of free online storage space with a Web interface. Other companies like Sharemation also give limited access to users. These personal storage options are, sometimes, also called virtual hard disk. 

Ankit Khare