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Monday, July 28, 2008

Lost in the Clouds

Continued from page 1

By Rich Parr

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One product affected by the outage was Dropbox, a file-synchronization and -backup service for Macs and PCs. "Syncing and Web access to files was offline during the S3 outage," says Dropbox founder Drew Houston. "But Dropbox stores all files locally, so users could still access and change their files, and queued changes synced immediately after S3 returned."

Dropbox's ability to respond to the outage highlights a difference between services that exist only in the cloud and those that use the cloud to keep devices current. "Sync-based solutions are somewhat more tolerant of minor outages, whereas online-only applications are completely sensitive to downtime," says John McCrea, vice president of marketing for Plaxo.

This point is not lost on Google, which is developing a product--Google Gears--that brings the resiliency of synchronization to its suite of Web-based applications. "Where Google is moving with Gears, which provides the ability to work locally and sync and update the cloud when there is connection, is a viable way forward," says InfoCloud's Vander Wal.

Regardless of how much redundancy developers can build into their applications, the question remains: are users ready to trust their data to the cloud? Vander Wal is skeptical. "A lot of the conceptual models just aren't there in people's heads," he says.

The trick, says Dropbox's Houston, is to make the transition as familiar and seamless as possible. "The cloud will make a lot of things easier, but it's less useful if you have to change your behavior or can't use the apps you need," he says. What people need, Houston says, is a solution that "just works."
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Tags

Apple cloud cloud computing Plaxo Web apps

Comments

  • File synchronization
    squall on 07/28/2008 at 11:15 AM
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    In addition, Microsoft now offers something called "Foldershare" which allows you to synchronize the files on several computers. Foldershare used to be an independent company, but they were snapped up by MS.

    I've been using it to sync my research work and it works quite well, even though I know traditionally Microsoft has a bad rap.

    Peter
    How Your Electronics Work
    http://www.howyourelectronicswork.com
    Rate this comment: 12345
    • Re: File synchronization
      cslemp on 07/28/2008 at 1:30 PM
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      Foldershare is nice, but Mesh is even better. My Mesh experience has been terrific. Three primary machines all synchronizing and can remote desktop to any of them. I'm even accessing the files and adding photos using my 2-year old smartphone.
      Rate this comment: 12345
  • Poorly written article
    plaak on 07/29/2008 at 9:02 AM
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    This article doesn't live up to the quality that I've come to expect from this magazine.  No explanation is given for why cloud computing is inherently less reliable than the technologies it is supposed to replace.  Given that Cloud Computing is advertised as and should have the potential to delivery higher reliability than traditional service methods, some kind of explanation is expected.  Of course, the users of the cloud services are dependent on their Internet connectivity (versus, say, having the data live on their own LAN or HardDrive).  However, these connectivity requirements are not unique to cloud computing as many of the services that they are replacing also require this (e.g., corporate email, file services, hosted applications, etc). 

    What's more, I believe (but am not certain) that both the Amazon S3 outage and MobileMe's issues had little to do with Internet Connectivity and everything to do with hiccup's on the service side (e.g., operator error, hardware issues, software bugs, etc).  In other words, Amazon and Apple likely didn't give enough consideration to scalability, potential for operator error, etc.  Clearly cloud computing is not a panacea that will allow its operators to give short shrift to day-to-day operations and software developers to completely ignore reliability issues.  However, it shows great promise to improve the accessibility, reliability, speed, and reduce the cost of a large percentage of computing services currently out there despite some initial stumbles (mind you, I've yet to see anyone compare what the reliability might have been for these same customers had they tried to host their data in-house)

    If the thrust of this article is simply that the home consumer shouldn't yet replace local HD storage with the Cloud in certain circumstances, then you may have a point.  However, this same argument would hold true for any other local-storage replacement technology (e.g., storing data on a remote NAS).  You should clarify this.
    Rate this comment: 12345
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