Online Photo Site Shuttered, Images Erased

Photo sharing is one of the most popular online activities, driving enormous growth for Fickr, Photobucket and even Facebook. But be careful where you store your photos. The credit crunch apparently was a factor in the sudden demise of Digital Railroad, a photo archiving and commerce site used by about 1,500 professional photographers. Janice Chen at ZDNet writes that the sudden collapse of Digital Railroad has left customers without access to their photos. The company closed its web sites Oct. 31, saying that “given DRR’s current cash position, it can no longer keep these servers operational.”

Users are referred to the web site of Diablo Management, a company that specializes in liquidations of distressed assets. Diablo reports that it was unable to find a buyer for Digital Railroad’s assets.

EMC Rolls Out Cloud Storage Offering

Storage giant EMC is taking the wraps off its ”cloud optimized storage” offering named Atmos, which has been in use by EMC customers since June. Atmos is software that makes it easy for customers to store petabytes of data on EMC hardware in locations around the globe. EMC is said to be gearing Atmos toward huge content distribution services, such as video and photo sharing sites. For details, see coverage at Network World, StorageZilla and The Register.

FCoE a Hot Topic at Storage Networking World

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) made most of the headlines at this week’s Storage Networking World. FCoE is an emerging protocol that can connect servers with Fibre Channel storage networks, offering the potential to reduce the number of interface connections on each server. Here’s a roundup of some of the media coverage of Storage Networking World.

• Storage giant EMC introduced its first FCoE switch and said it will support Emulex network adapters using FCoE, moves that could speed adoption of the new protocol.
• EMC’s Chuck Hollis, reflecting on the SNW show and his company’s announcements, wrote that “it’s pretty clear that the one standout from this event is that it marks the date where FCoE is starting to be taken very seriously by customers and vendors alike.”
• NetApp said it would provide native support for FCoE in a storage array. “If you have a NetApp system, FCoE will work with an FCoE target card,” said Joel Reich, VP of NetApp’s SANiSAN unit.
• Cisco Systems (CSCO), which has built much of its Data Center 3.0 strategy around FCoE, said that it is now running FCoE in production for its News@Cisco web site.  
• The Register wonders how FCoE’s momentum will impact iSCSI, a cheaper alternative to Fibre Channel which has also been advanced as a potential unifying standard for data center networking. ”So is this the end for the iSCSI internet storage standard?,” Chris Mellor writes. “Has Dell’s EqualLogic purchase suddenly been devalued?”   

Amazon S3 Storing 29 Billion Objects

Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Service reports that Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is now storing more than 29 billion, an increase of 7 billion from the previous quarter. “As one of the S3 engineers told me last week, that’s over 4 objects for every person now on Earth,” Jeff writes. At peak usage, S3 is handling more than 70,000 requests per second.

So what’s next? Amazon is lowering prices on S3 storage, with a new four-tier pricing plan that takes effect on Nov. 1. Customers storing more than 500 terabytes will get a rate of 12 cents per gigabyte.

When Amazon S3 was launched in March 2006, we wondered whether it would be a disruptive force or non-event. “It’s too early to say whether S3 (and the similar services that will certainly follow) is the start of something big or an experiment,” I wrote at the time. With 29 billion storage objects, it’s definitely something big.

Voltaire Cites Wall Street Slowdown in Loss

Merrill Lynch may still be buying technology gear, but other Wall Street firms are delaying IT purchases. Voltaire (VOLT), which makes grid solutions for the data center, said this week that it would report a third-quarter loss due to postponed purchases.

“Revenues for the quarter were lower than initially forecast given a delay in the receipt of two multi-million dollar orders from US-based financial institutions,” the company reported. “These two orders, initially expected at the end of the quarter, were not received due to the turbulence in the capital markets at the end of September 2008.”

Voltaire makes switches that support grid computing deployments on commodity servers and storage hardware. Link via InsideHPC.

Cloud Storage Firm Zetta Gets $10 Million

Cloud storage startup Zetta said today that it has closed a $10.68 million Series A financing round led by venture capital firms Sigma Partners and Foundation Capital. Zetta, which does not yet have a working web site, plans to use the funding to expand product development, marketing and operations.

In a press release announcing the funding, Zetta sys it is “is advancing the state of the art for enterprise storage by delivering feature rich solutions for IT administrators without the costs, complexities and risks associated with traditional storage software and hardware solutions.” Zetta was founded by industry veterans Lou Montulli, Jeff Whitehead, Jason Harrison and Jeff Treuhaft.

Serious Cloud Storage Stumble for FlexiScale

Cloud storage service FlexiScale has been offline for several days while it attempts to fully restore customer data from backup, the company told customers yesterday. The problems for FlexiScale began when one of the main storage volumes was accidentally deleted by an employee during a system upgrade earlier this week. FlexiScale then encountered problems while trying to restore the data from backup, as explained by CEO Tony Lucas:

Although we have now successfully gained read-only access to everyones data, a bug in the storage platforms operating system has prevented us from providing read-write access to it. … After consulting with our storage vendor it was agreed the most sensible option would be to copy the entire volume to a new disk structure (still maintaining it’s integrity and structure), from where we could re-mount it correctly. Unfortunately due to it’s size we didn’t have spare capacity on the platform to create a complete duplicate of it. … The decision was then taken to get additional capacity in from the storage vendor as soon as possible so that we could then increase the capacity to a sufficient level to allow us to copy the volume and successfully restore it.

FlexiScale’s problems come just two weeks after another cloud storage provider, The LinkUp, shut down suddenly following a customer data loss. Lucas says he remains “confident about restoring all the data.” In an update today he said the company has “seen very little data corruption of the data we have examined although we can’t rule it out completely.”

FlexiScale is a unit of UK hosting company Excalibre Communciations.

Cloud Storage Service Loses Data, Shuts Down

What happens when a cloud service fails and closes? Network World looks at the demise of The Linkup, a cloud storage previously known as Media Max, which shut down Aug. 8 after losing “an unspecified amount of customer data,” perhaps as much as 45 percent of all data the service stored.

The resulting blame game has raised a critical question: when you store your data in the cloud, where does it live and who really “owns” it? The failure of The Linkup has shown that these questions may not be as clear-cut as customers believe, and has resulted in finger-pointing between The Linkup management and Nirvanix.

The bottom line appears to be that a “major storage problem” in June 2007 at the former parent of both The Linkup and Nirvanix left some customer files inaccessible. Nirvanix says the files were never transferred to the system it hosted for The Linkup, so it never had custody of them. The files may still be floating around somewhere in the cloud, but are only accessible through software/systems from the predecessor company. It’s a complicated mess. In addition to the Network World coverage, you can read more at The Industry Standard, a blog post from Nirvanix, and discussion at Slashdot.

Iron Mountain’s Natural Cooling Advantage

With a growing number of providers building underground data bunkers, a leading name in data storage is entering the game in a more substantial fashion. Iron Mountain, which has been a market leader in storage of documents and backup tapes, is beginning to lease data center space in its huge facility located 220 feet underground in a limestone cave outside Pittsburgh.

CIO recently reported that Marriott will become the largest private customer operating a data center in Iron Mountain’s 145-acre facility, which has its own fire company, water treatment plant and 24-hour security and maintenance force. Marriott is leasing 12,500 square feet of data center space from Iron Mountain for a disaster recovery “hot site.” Here’s some additional background:

The company calculated that the 10-year cost of colocating a new data center at Iron Mountain’s underground facility would be cost neutral compared to its existing agreement for disaster recovery, according to a spokesperson. Plus, the opportunity to improve energy efficiency would bring significant savings and help the company to achieve its environmental goals.

Those savings were driven by the cooling advantages of an underground facility, where the cooler temperature allows tenants to spend save money on air conditioning.

Mozy Cloud Storage Gains With Businesses

In another sign of the potential for online storage, EMC said this week that its cloud storage service Mozy Inc. has doubled the size of its enterprise and small to medium-size business customer base during the first half of 2008. Mozy now has more than 750,000 users and 20,000 business customers backing up 7.6 billion files to its 10-petabyte storage system, according to EMC.

Mozy’s growing traction with business users may be helped by a deal in which its services will be marketed to customers of the huge office supply retail chain Staples. The service, called Staples Network Services, will be offered through Thrive Networks, a subsidiary of Staples.