Another cloud storage provider enters the fray
I’ve posted recently about both Microsoft and Google dipping their toes into the cloud services business. Yesterday, Rackspace announced CloudFS, a new cloud storage service from their cloud computing division Mosso. While Rackspace isn’t quite a household name like Google or Amazon, they have a great reputation for running reliable data centers and have 8 located around the US and Europe. Unlike the Microsoft and Google cloud offerings, CloudFS looks to be competing directly with Amazon S3 by offering unlimited storage with no minimum and no maximum. It’s not yet clear how competitive they will be price or feature-wise, but more competition will be great for the market in the long run.
How about you? Would you consider using a cloud storage provider other than Amazon? Is there a particular price level or some piece of functionality that might make you consider switching? Let us know in the comments.
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Bram Klijsen said,
May 6, 2008 @ 12:03 pm
Dave,
Amazon has proven themselves to be a very reliable service which is my primary requirement. On top of that the prices are very competitive. Amazon has demonstrated that they understand the business model of cloud storage and computing and are not just dabbling in it. To me this means that they will be providing the S3 service for a long a time. Unless another service matches these requirements I am quite happy to stay with Amazon.
Keep up the great work!
Bram
David Moore said,
May 6, 2008 @ 12:33 pm
I use multiple cloud storage locations already to maintain redundancy of my music and pictures.
For me Amazon price is great for 60GB of data, I use my Jungle Disk as a working drive (only i keep forgetting to back this up elsewhere
)
Steven said,
May 6, 2008 @ 12:40 pm
Eh. I’d switch to Google storage instead of amazon in a heartbeat. Rackspace? not so much.
Jeff S said,
May 6, 2008 @ 2:44 pm
I would switch to someone who was cheaper, but only someone with a more known brand name. I’m not storing that much data (about 5gb), some of which changes daily during the nightly sync backups, and some that’s fixed (photos), but there is a lot more data I’d like to store - like in the order of 20gb of permanent non-changing data, and perhaps even more. While 15 cents per gig isn’t that much money, but it does add up. Competition is good, so we shall see.
I am not unhappy with Amazon in the slightest I should add. The value for what I’m getting now is excellent. I’m staying with Amazon now, but will watch market trends.
Eric said,
May 6, 2008 @ 2:45 pm
I will go with the first one that is made compatable with Time Machine.
Antonio Rodriguez said,
May 6, 2008 @ 2:50 pm
Prob the 2 most important things
1) Company reputation (longevity, reliability). I’ve only seen Amazon down once in my life (got a screenshot too).
2) Price.
Google could probably compete w/ Amazon. Not very confident about Rackspace. Perhaps Jungledisk could expand to connect to a Google solution if that comes out, though I was under the impression that Google Bigtable was more like a database than anything else.
Mark said,
May 6, 2008 @ 3:00 pm
It would depend on the driver used to access the service. I want something that MS OneNote can access. The only webdav interface they support is SharePoint.
wires said,
May 6, 2008 @ 3:33 pm
Amazon has always seemed very robust and reliable but Rackspace has a great reputation. If they provided a competitive price and a reliable service I would definitely make the switch or use both.
Dave said,
May 6, 2008 @ 3:38 pm
Hi Dave,
Sure: uptime is important to me. Not being to access my data all the time is not as important as is the insurance of redundancy, i.e. knowing that my data is out there somewhere, maybe just not now.
But even MORE important to me is privacy. Jungle Disk is awesome because you encrypt it with the AES-256 bit encryption, so even if I lose it, I know my data is safe from being hacked into.
Dude, your product is awesome. I heard you on Security Now! and have been a fanboy ever since.
Cheers,
Other Dave
Peter Secor said,
May 6, 2008 @ 4:13 pm
It’s interesting to me to see the different cloud storage providers popping up. (Note I’m with an online storage outfit.) Amazon does really well, but I’ve always tried to keep my bets hedged a bit and not rely upon one vendor or technology. I think the interesting thing will be to see what the specific strengths and weaknesses of the different solutions evolve to be (streaming, massive cheap slow storage, associated computing power, etc.).
Have fun!
Alex said,
May 6, 2008 @ 5:01 pm
I am very content with the Amazon Web Services at this point, but would encourage JD to explore possible support for a secondary service. I really think JD is going to take off, and that’d be an outstanding feature. Perhaps then some JD service to allow redundancy between the two.
Thanks for your active development on all platforms.
Colin Henderson said,
May 6, 2008 @ 6:54 pm
This is all about trust. I trust S3 and use it religiously, with JD, whom I also trust.
I have been using google apps premium since it came out but they have not developed the security brand name that S3 has. When I speak to colleagues, Google is a convenience brand, not a trust brand.
So no, its not about price … the first issue for backup is trust and then reliability. I look at the download and upload speeds I get with S3 and nothing else comes close. This is part of the trust. I can tell they have optimised for the service they offer. They are focussed on one thing. While I like, trust and rely on Google for my communications, calendar, blackberry sync, I need to understand their full back up offer before I would even think about changing from S3.
Max Battcher said,
May 6, 2008 @ 7:10 pm
Isn’t that the beauty of cloud-based storage that ultimately it doesn’t matter where things are stored as long as we have reliable access to it? It would be neat to see JD support things like automatic redundancy or data partitioning across whichever services I wanted to rely upon. I could even see that as a unique JD+ feature: upload once to Amazon S3 and then get background auto-backup-backup by JD+’s EC2 cluster at faster speeds to other services.
cla said,
May 6, 2008 @ 7:21 pm
On the press release linked by the blog is stated that the price will be 0.15$/gigabyte (the same of amazon).
But I browsed into rackspace website and I found the following paragraph, that I think may be interesting:
“Finally, Rackspace only charges for outbound bandwidth, meaning that routine site maintenance, such as content publishing and uploads, are not counted against your bandwidth allocation.”
(last paragraph of http://www.rackspace.com/whyrackspace/network/bandwidthbilling.php )
So, if that would apply to their cloud, would mean free data upload, that would result into an excellent deal (and in a breakup of consumer-level bandwidth billing model) IMO.
I’ll wait for that service.
Apart that, if tehy would host that in Europe at the same price of US I would switch from Amazon (better privacy laws there). Well, I’m going to sign up to JD right now
Anandha said,
May 6, 2008 @ 7:41 pm
I use Mozy to backup my music and pics - amazon would be too expensive to backup all my music and pics (130GB and growing).. if there was an alternate backup solution that offered unlimited but was more reliable and had better customer service than mozy, i’d switch in a heartbeat.
Tim Read said,
May 7, 2008 @ 5:49 am
Another vote for Amazon. My only concern with Amazon is that perhaps this is not their core business in the same way it is for other companies, and that one day their services may be neglected or sold.
But I guess you provide a layer of abstraction that would make switching easier !
But for now I’m very happy with Amazon.
Hans said,
May 7, 2008 @ 6:51 am
“Automatic redundancy” is a term that was already mentioned. I second this and name the feature “Cloud-RAID”: Would be great if JungleDisk could span data across numerous storage suppliers and thereby assure that it’s always accessible, even if one of them is temporary down or loses your data completely in a worst case scenario!
Jim said,
May 7, 2008 @ 8:19 am
I would consider Google Storage / GDrive (supposing it ever arrives) as a second backup location. For JD I prefer Amazon.
Robert Accettura said,
May 7, 2008 @ 9:13 am
I would definitely consider RackSpace since they do have a great reputation for several years as those who keep up on the managed and unmanaged hosting business know.
In particular it could be good for those of us who want cloud storage for making media accessible via the web. Amazon allows hosting via a CNAME, which is nice, but Amazon’s upstream bandwidth prices aren’t cheap.
Les Smith said,
May 7, 2008 @ 10:52 pm
Rackspace is not reliable …
http://valleywag.com/347444/rackspace-goes-down-again-loses-tumblrs-business
Breakdowns:Rackspace goes down again, loses Tumblr’s business
Microblogging service Tumblr went down for a few hours yesterday. The outage cost the world several hours of vintage pinup girls and ironic reblogging. And it cost managed hosting service Rackspace a customer.
This morning, Tumblr founder David Karp said he planned to move the site to a new hosting services provider, blaming Rackspace for a “botched” firewall upgrade and decrying the “exorbitant price” his company paid for its services.
It’s been a bad last couple months for Rackspace. When Web-based collaboration software provider 37signals went down for a few hours on Friday morning, it too blamed Rackspace. Rackspace retorted that the problem was isolated to 37signals. How reassuring to know that Rackspace’s finger-pointing services are available 24/7.
Rackspace also went down in early December. And in November, a careening truck destroyed a power transformer, taking all of Rackspace’s customers offline. But hey, before that, Rackspace was called the “most reliable” Web host in September 2007.
Luke said,
May 8, 2008 @ 7:57 am
The Rackspace offering is highly appealing to me, although as a developer this is more in terms of a development platform rather than for backups. We host many servers with Rackspace at work, and the prospect of tapping into their cloud storage within our hosting environment is compelling.
Interestingly, JD gets a mention on their beta signup page as a competitor! http://www.mosso.com/cloudfs/register.jsp
Ian Page said,
May 13, 2008 @ 3:15 pm
I really don’t care where the data stored as long as it’s secure, multi-location and reliable… Couldn’t give people a choice so you could choose between amazon, google or rackspace ? as long as they are using Jungle Disk.
cheers
Joshua said,
May 30, 2008 @ 12:13 pm
I would love to see Google added to jungle disks options so long as the files are accessible from any browser. I would also be great if every file had a dedicated URL (especially pics and mp3) you could use to link to those files in your webpage. (maybe this exists, I haven’t played around to much with the service.)