What’s Wrong with ‘Cloud Storage’

Perusing several industry magazines yesterday, I was besieged by the number of instances where ‘cloud computing’ and ‘cloud storage’ were used as phrases that should be well understood by anyone reading the articles.

There is a huge difference between understanding that which is being said and agreeing in principle with it.

The entire idea of cloud computing, or cloud storage, smacks of the ‘pie in the sky’ concept, and knowing that any pie that might appear in the sky soon falls due to gravity is a sobering idea for the thoughtful.

An article written to counter the fears of those who would discourage use of cloud storage was quick to point out the amazing reliability of storage these days, noting the MTBF of enterprise class hard drives. The funny thing about that is that few really understand the concept of MTBF. If the concept was more universally understood, many more backup utilities and media solutions would be in use by Joe Average.

The really problematic thing in the explanation of cloud storage is the nebulous concept of ‘the storage space of my data’. By their own admission, in the large storage concept, there is no way for the entity storing the information to know exactly where their information is stored. By this I mean not physically on a disk or disks, but the physical location of where the disks reside. This leaves me with a very uneasy feeling. Perhaps it is because I have always been more of an ‘owner’ than a ‘renter’, and a ‘purchaser’ rather than a ‘borrower’.  I guess the easiest explanation is the fact that I like to own CDs rather than downloading mp3s. It has to do with sound quality, but that is not the only reason. Having the disk within my grasp at any time is comforting - and that is only music. You can probably imagine how I might feel about sensitive data.

I really can’t believe that there aren’t many more like me in the world, just not willing to trust this concept, and more than anyone who has experienced internet connectivity loss has faith that it will ‘always be there’.  It simply doesn’t track.  I remember a few months back when many sites in Asia and Australia were continuously unavailable due to an underwater cable being severed. Can you imagine running without your data for several months?

Until the ‘cloud’ is large enough to contain multiple locations of my data, spaced well apart, with the ability to immediately retrieve from any location immediately, the forecast for cloud storage ‘looks like rain’.

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Technorati Tags: cloud computing - cloud storage - mesh - uncertainty - redundancy - failover

[tags] cloud computing, cloud storage, mesh, uncertainty, redundancy, failover [/tags]