CNET's Gordon Haff wrote a great piece on the shortcomings of the exchange model for cloud computing. His prognosis is right there in his title: " Why cloud exchanges won't work ." I've done some thinking and writing on the topic...

Since cloud storage is not backup in and of itself, anyone wanting to use cloud for backup needs additional software smarts. One of the smartest data protection and archiving suites out there is CommVault's Simpana. Mixing their intelligent software...

Go read that headline again: W. Curtis "Mr. Backup" Preston points out on his blog that replication is not backup , and we can't disagree. Keeping alternative copies of data in multiple locations is a great idea , reducing the risk of data...

Verifying the files you have stored on our servers is an important part of data integrity. To calculate the MD5 we store on our servers in Perl the quick solution would be to use the built in b64digest output which is part of the Digest::MD5 class. For...

My youngest daughter used to have trouble with her animals. Whenever she saw a giraffe, she would say "zebra" and whenever she saw a zebra she would say "giraffe!" Although an adult would never make that mistake, one can understand...

I'm loathe to give predictions, preferring introspection and outright silliness . But the turn of the year is a time of optimism, so I will take my turn at the megaphone to dish out some ideas I believe will come to pass in the coming year. 2010 will...

This morning, Amazon took a step with EC2 that many had long anticipated: They announced spot pricing for cloud compute instances . EC2 customers can now name their own price, and Amazon will bring compute instances up at variable discount prices according...

As we plummet down into Gartner's " trough of disillusionment ", the cloud skeptics are making their voices heard. Although my professional focus is at the forefront of the cloud storage wave, I can not disagree with the content of articles...

Our friends at Vembu just came out with a very entertaining parody on the cloud space set to the tune of Vanilla Ice's, Ice-Ice Baby (or Bowies' Under Pressure for you purists) titled Cloud Cloud Maybe . They present a pretty good high level overview...

Take a look at the various data storage offerings called "cloud" and your head will start to ache. How can so many things all bear the "cloud storage" name and yet be so totally different? The answer is obvious to long-time industry...