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cloud storage

Shuffle sharding in Dropbox's storage infrastructure

Volumes are spread somewhat-randomly throughout a cell, and each OSD holds several thousand volumes. This means that if we lose a single OSD we can reconstruct the full set of volumes from hundreds of other OSDs simultaneously. This allows us to amortize the reconstruction traffic across hundreds of network cards and thousands of disk spindles to minimize recovery time. » about 300 words

Claim chowder: cloud storage

Ten years ago Apple was still doing MacWorld Expo keynotes, and that year they introduced Time Capsule.

My response was this: forget Time Capsule, I want a space ship:

So here’s my real question: Why hasn’t Apple figured out how to offer me a storage solution that puts frequently used items on local disk, and less-frequently used items on a network disk? Seamlessly.

Ten years later: cloud storage is definitely the norm. Dropbox is about to IPO. And iCloud is the glue that unifies the Apple experience across all its devices (and which you’re perpetually out of space on, unless you pay).

Is The Filesystem Finally Dead?

From Rob Foster/Nimble Design:

By releasing the iPhone OS, Apple is putting a bullet in the head of a long standing convention that most folks could do without.

He’s talking about the filesystem. User-accessible filesystems, anyway.

This isn’t news, I don’t think the Newton even had a hidden filesystem, but it hasn’t gotten old yet.

My question: when will I finally get a system that cleverly mixes cloud and local storage to give me seamless access to all my photos, videos, music, and email…ever?

Backblaze Storage Pod

Backblaze is a cloud backup service that needs cheap storage. Lots of it. They say a petabyte worth of raw drives runs under $100,000, but buying that much storage in products from major vendors easily costs over $1,000,000. So they built their own. The result is a 4U rack-mounted Linux-based server that contains 67 terabytes […] » about 100 words

ExpanDrive FTP/SFTP/Amazon S3 Client

ExpanDrive makes FTP, SFTP, and Amazon S3 connectivity dead easy.

ExpanDrive acts just like a USB drive plugged into your Mac. Open, edit, and save files to remote computers from within your favorite programs—even when they are on a server half a world away. ExpanDrive enhances every single application on your computer by transparently connecting it to remote data.

Forget Time Capsule, I want a Space Ship

Apple’s Time Capsule is great. Seriously. When has backup been easier? But I need more. The MacBook Air‘s small storage highlights a problem I’ve been suffering for some time: there’s never enough storage. The slower processor and limited RAM expansion are sufferable, but storage isn’t. The 120GB drive in my MacBook Pro now is stuffed […] » about 500 words

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service

Ryan Eby got me excited about S3 a while ago when he pointed out this post on the Amazon web services blog and started talking up the notion of building library-style digital repositories. I’m interested in the notion that storage is being offered as a commodity service, where it used to be closely connected to […] » about 200 words