A technology blog for The Economist Group IT team
Friday, March 17, 2006
All your storage are belong to us
I read a couple of interesting stories about the development of online storage this week.
First up, ZDNet have a story about Amazon's new S3 storage service which they are making available to web developers. They are charging per gig stored and also for bandwidth used. For Amazon, it's a way for them to make more of a return out of the infrastructure they've already invested a lot of money in, and for developers they also win because they have access to limitless amounts of storage without having to think about managing the infrastructure side of it.
The prices seem low but I suppose if you wrote an application using S3 which then became the next killer app you might end up being Amazon's best customer.
Next, I read a few pieces of fact, speculation and rumour/rumor (I am beginning to feel conflicted over US and UK spelling) about the Google GDrive service. Privacy issues aside, it will supposedly offer a big, free, mapped drive that you can get to from any internet-connected computer. Back in ye olde dotcom-bubble days there was a free service called XDrive which was pretty similar, they are still going but they are now subscription-only now.
Footnote - Click here if you are wondering what's going on with the title of this post
First up, ZDNet have a story about Amazon's new S3 storage service which they are making available to web developers. They are charging per gig stored and also for bandwidth used. For Amazon, it's a way for them to make more of a return out of the infrastructure they've already invested a lot of money in, and for developers they also win because they have access to limitless amounts of storage without having to think about managing the infrastructure side of it.
The prices seem low but I suppose if you wrote an application using S3 which then became the next killer app you might end up being Amazon's best customer.
Next, I read a few pieces of fact, speculation and rumour/rumor (I am beginning to feel conflicted over US and UK spelling) about the Google GDrive service. Privacy issues aside, it will supposedly offer a big, free, mapped drive that you can get to from any internet-connected computer. Back in ye olde dotcom-bubble days there was a free service called XDrive which was pretty similar, they are still going but they are now subscription-only now.
Footnote - Click here if you are wondering what's going on with the title of this post
Comments:
If you want GDrive now, my GMail Drive still works and allows me to store files through a mapped drive in my Gmail account....I was going to say it's unsupported, though, but then realised that most of what Google do is effectively just that anyway.
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