The Structure08 conference the next day was a more typical conference format with a number of presentations, interviews, and panels. For a first-year event I thought it was very well organized and ran smoothly - they even managed to get back on schedule after slipping early on. The quality of the individual sessions was mixed.  Some, such as Werner’s keynote and the cloud-provider panel were interesting, while others like the cloud database panel came off as pure product pitches.

I also found it quite interesting to see how Mendel Rosenblum, Chief Scientist of VMWare, and Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun see their companies positioned in the cloud computing world. Both companies are in a similar position - they sell premium hardware/software for large-scale computing to enterprise, but both are being bypassed by cloud providers like Amazon and Google who are building their infrastructure on commodity hardware and open-source software like Xen for both cost and control reasons. The risk to Sun and VMWare is that enterprises may start moving their applications from their own datacenters running VMWare/Sun and into the commodity cloud infrastructure.

Mendel’s take was that cloud computing today is basically ASP2.0 - and companies that got burned before won’t fall for it again. Mendel sees their VMWare platform as a way for companies to create “mini-clouds” that they can host themselves, gaining the benefits of cloud computing without losing control.

Greg’s take is slightly different - he thinks that just because computing is becoming a commodity, it doesn’t mean you need to run on commodity hardware. He illustrated this with a few examples, like a portable generator versus a powerplant steam turbine. No one expects the electric utilities to run off hundreds of portable generators - they use larger, efficient, and higher quality systems. Of course the problem I see with this analogy is that the performance difference between a portable generator and a steam turbine is huge - many orders of magnitude. By comparison, the performance difference of a white-box Intel or AMD machine isn’t going to differ much from equivalent Sun hardware. There are certainly other factors - such as reliability and maintenance, but at the end of the day, Sun will have to provide significant leadership in $/cycle and cycles/watt in order to displace commodity hardware in the cloud.

Of course for most Jungle Disk users this doesn’t really matter much - in fact, the whole point of the “cloud” is that users (you) don’t need to know or care how it’s built or what hardware and software it’s running. In the bigger picture however this movement is going to change the whole makeup of the computer industry. The wide-scale migration of data and applications into the cloud is going to create new opportunities for some and many challenges for traditional software, hardware, and hosting providers. Online backup in particular is going to rapidly supplant traditional tape backup and offsite tape rotation services within the next few years.

Jungle Disk 2.0 includes major upgrades in functionality, performance, and ease of use. Here are some of the highlights:

• New User Interface
  • New first-time setup wizard makes setup a snap
  • New configuration dialog to organize our growing list of features
  • New backup preview dialog so you can see exactly what will be backed up
  • New backup selection dialog makes it faster and easier to set up automatic backup
• Support for new Jungle Disk 2.0 buckets
  • Instantly rename files and directories
  • Optionally encrypt file & directory names
  • Change encryption key (bucket password) for existing files instantly
  • Unlimited number of buckets supported
• Support for Compatibility buckets, which can be shared with other S3 tools
• Support for European S3 buckets (note: Jungle Disk Plus not supported)
• Support for connecting to multiple buckets at the same time
• Support for multiple backup jobs with independent scheduling
• Expanded bandwidth limiting feature
  • Applies to both network drive and automatic backup traffic
  • Set limits on both upload and download rates
  • Change limits on the fly
  • Set schedules for limits
• New Previous Versions features
  • Set minimum and maximum number of previous versions to keep
  • Exclude file types and directories from previous versions
  • Customize previous version settings on a per-backup-job basis
• New command line options to integrate with external task schedulers and batch jobs
• Greatly improved performance for large directories and large cache sizes
• ..and much more!

Jungle Disk 2.0 is a free upgrade for all existing Jungle Disk users. Head over to the download page to get the new version.

We’ve also released a public beta of the Workgroup Edition for businesses.

The Workgroup Edition makes it easy for small companies to backup their desktops and have a secure network drive to share between employees. The software is built on the robust and well-tested codebase of the Desktop Edition. The pricing for the Workgroup Edition software is simple - just $2 per user per month, which includes all the Jungle Disk Plus functionality as well. Each user can install the software on multiple machines at no additional charge and free upgrades are included. All you pay for storage and transfer is the base Amazon S3 rates($0.15 per gigabyte) making Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition one of the most affordable workgroup storage solutions available.

You can read more about the Workgroup Edition on our newly redesigned website.  Companies interested in trying out the beta version can sign-up now and get started right away.

You can download the release candidate from our beta download page. As always, you can read about the latest features and fixes in the release notes. Please post any issues you encounter to our beta forum.

For our Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition private beta testers, we are also making an updated build of the Workgroup Edition beta available. You can download it from our Workgroup Beta download page. For those not in the private beta program, the public beta for the Workgroup Edition will be launching shortly.

For those hoping for more Jungle Disk news - not to worry, the team is hard at work putting the finishing touches on the final 2.0 release, as well as the public beta for the Workgroup Edition. If all goes well you can expect both before the end of the month! I’m personally going to sneak away for a few days to attend the Structure08 cloud computing conference in San Francisco later this month - if you happen to be there be sure to say hi.

We’ve determined the cause of the issue and created a fix, which is now available in Jungle Disk 1.50d for Mac. The Windows and Linux versions are not affected and have not been updated.

The Jungle Disk 2.0 beta is also affected by this issue and we will be including the fix in the next 2.0 beta release.

If you are a Jungle Disk Plus subscriber with web access enabled you can help us test a beta of the new site by going to:
https://<yourname>.beta.myjungledisk.com
Please post any feedback or issues to our Jungle Disk 2.0 forum.