Adoption of cloud computing is reaching new heights. This week both the Pentagon and the CIA discussed their uses of cloud computing.

Both are using their own, private clouds, but these security-conscious entities are embracing the paradigm.

The analysis leaves a lot to be desired, but the conclusions of CloudScaling’s Randy Bias cannot be ignored. And while simple, the math is grounded in reasonable assumptions and backed by independent sources.

His figure puts AWS revenue for EC2 alone at almost $220 million annually. This is real revenue. And we think he estimate for S3 revenues is way low – the bandwidth costs alone are enormous. There are some interesting points raised in the comments. Care to raise any here?

This is a theoretical question with practical business implications, but we’ve received some request from third parties to include firms that specialize in large file transfer in our directory so we’re curious…

Your responses are going to help us out – thanks in advance.

Leading cloud backup providers AllMyData, Carbonite, EMC (DBA Decho and Mozy), Iron Mountain, Officeware (DBA FilesAnywhere.com), Pro Softnet (DBA iBackup and iDrive) are being sued in a patent case filed Wednesday in the Eastern Texas District Court.  The plaintiff, Network Backup Corp (NBC) is alleging infringment of US Patent 5,133,065 and seeking compensatory damages.  Although little is known about NBC, the report indicates that the company acquired the intellectual property from Personal Computer Peripherals Corp subsequent to the patent’s issuance on July 21, 1992.  The claims were drafted and the application was filed on July 27, 1989.

A preliminary review reveals a broad and generic patent regarding network based backup.  The brief, 11-page claim identifies issues with prevailing backup systems such as “workstations [with] a only floppy disk drive on which a backup could be made” in the abstract.  It was not immediately apparent if the patent had previously been successfully defended.

Also named as defendants in the suit are Best Buy (presumably with respect to the Geek Squad Online Backup product) and Webroot, who offers services via a partnership with SOS Online Backup.

Reproduced from the Southeast Texas Record here.

Network Backup Corp. vs. AllMyData Inc. et al

Plaintiff Network Backup Corp. (NBC) is a Texas corporation with its principal place of business in Longview.

According to the complaint, U.S. Patent No. 5,133,065 was issued July 21, 1992, for a Backup Computer Program for Networks to Edward L. Cheffetz and Ronald C. Searls. At its issuance, the ‘065 Patent was assigned to Personal Computer Peripherals Corp. and is currently assigned to plaintiff NBC.

Network Backup Corp. is only asserting claims 6-10, the method claims, and not the system claims of the ‘065 Patent in this complaint.

The plaintiff alleges that defendants AllMyData, Best Buy, Carbonite, EMC Corp., Iron Mountain, Netmass, Officeware doing business as FilesAnywhere.com, Pro Softnet and Webroot Software are infringing one or more of the method claims of the ‘065 Patent.

The defendants infringe the method by their paid online backup subscription services.

“Each of the Defendants has committed acts of infringement which have caused damage to NBC (Network Backup Corp.),” the suit states.

The plaintiff is seeking compensatory damages, interest, costs and other relief deemed just and proper.

S. Calvin Capshaw of Capshaw DeRieux LLP in Longview and attorneys from Parker, Bunt & Ainsworth PC in Tyler are representing the plaintiff. Attorneys from Vanek, Vickers & Masini PC and The Law Offices of Eugene M. Cummings PC in Chicago are of counsel.

The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge T. John Ward.

Case No. 2:09-cv-249-TJW

Managing large amounts of data is very challenging technical endeavor, but for many cloud storage providers the volume of data they are tasked with protecting and maintaining is so large that it presents unique challenges.

One of those particularly daunting issues is “silent data corruption.” This topic is discussed by Zetta CTO Jeff Whitehead in a recent blog entry. Whitehead’s excellent description of the problem and how to analyze it includes a calculator to help estimate the probability of random disk failures – this should be required reading for any system administrator or architect of a cloud storage solution. If you’ve built one and this is news to you – you (and your customers) are in trouble…

We included a large excerpt below (Jeff: let us know if you would prefer we take it down):

IT professionals are well aware of many challenges related to scaling storage: capital required to house data, manage backups, data center space, power and cooling. One area many IT professionals haven’t had time to look at, however, is how increasing data footprints translate into increased risk of data loss or data corruption. To put this in context, IDC recently reported that data volumes will increase by a “factor of almost five,” while “total IT budgets worldwide will only grow by a factor of 1.2 and IT staff by a factor of 1.1.” In this context of constraints, being asked to do more with less, without special attention to data risk management, risk inevitably increases.

I believe that many IT professionals and CIO’s will be very surprised to see that while Data Loss (ie, simultaneous drive failures) may not be very probable, Data Corruption (the data on disk is no longer what was originally written out by the application) is shockingly likely, and has caused outages for even some of the most technologically advanced high end environments.

The objective of this blog is to introduce or reintroduce the concept of “Mean Time To Data Loss (MTTDL),” whereby IT professionals, CIOs, and risk managers can create a probabilistic model for evaluating the reliability and probability of data loss for your current environment, and also compare and contrast with how Zetta is advancing the state of the art for cost effective data protection.

MTTDL is a tool, and to be effective one must understand its limitations. The inputs to the model are as follows:

The number of hard drives (data set size/system performance)
The reliability of each hard drive
The probability of reading a given hard drive correctly without error (see prior blog about silent data corruption)
The redundancy encoding of the system
The rebuild rate.
Mean Time to Data Loss is in many respects a best case scenario, because it ignores risks to data integrity such as fire, natural disaster, human error, and other common causes of storage failures. It also ignores autocorrelation¸ or drives failing at the same time due to similar workload, similar manufacturing batches, firmware issues, or the like. Despite these limitations, MTTDL is still one of the better tools for evaluating the data protection features of a storage system.

In response to our recent post regarding Carbonite’s lawsuit against its hardware vendor, we received a comment from Carbonite’s CEO David Friend. The entire comment has been approved and published, but we wanted to make sure that his key points were recognized with a full posting, as opposed to just showing up in the comments of the original.

Key Point 1: Friend notes that the incident happened over a year ago and is “not an ongoing problem.”

Key Point 2: Friend asserts that while approximately 7,500 users were originally affected by the problems, only 54 users actually lost data (and most did not lose all of their data).

Key Point 3: Friend asserts that Carbonite has change its practices and its vendors to increase the reliability of its systems such that, according to the CEO, the chances of failure “are almost nil.”

It seems like a positive indication that Carbonite’s CEO is addressing this issue head on. The questions that remain are: 1) who is ultimately responsible for the problems that occurred, 2) is the new design Carbonite is using sufficiently reliable, and 3) how will this issue affect cloud storage providers and consumers?

Online backup company Carbonite alerted the public that it had lost data belonging to over 7,500 customers over a number of separate incidents by filing a law suit against a hardware vendor and systems integrator. Carbonite claims that the cloud storage disaster was the result of $3M in faulty equipment provided by Promise Technology Inc. and has brought suit in Suffolk County. The Boston Globe reports that Promise denies any wrongdoing or liability.

Regardless of the outcome, events like this do not bode well for cloud storage providers. Failures, regardless of who is at fault, damage the critical consumer confidence that cloud storage requires to thrive. The impact of this breakdown, from a well-funded (the Globe indicated that Carbonite has raised over $46m) and well-known player in the online backup space, remains to be seen.

Thoughts? Please let us know what you think…

We’re very interested in feedback on the newly launched Cloud Files services from Rackspace. The Rackers posted a very interesting blog entry that included performance analysis and cost comparisons that pits their service squarely against Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). If you are using the Cloud Files system, please post a comment and let us (and our readers) know what you think.

Shortly, we will be adding the Rackspace storage service to our directory (just gathering a little info for now)…

Earlier this week at the German trade show CeBIT, networking solutions provider Netgear (NASDAQ:NTGR) announced their entrance into the cloud storage space. In an extension of their fast growing network attached storage product, the ReadyNAS, the firm is offering a cloud based data protection service that comes pre-installed on new devices. A spokesperson described it as “the first NAS-Linked Online Disaster Recovery for consumers and SMBs.”

Closer inspection reveals that the service is delivered by existing cloud storage player ElephantDrive. The details of the partnership were not disclosed, but it looks like the accounts will differ dramatically from the regular small business storage accounts profiled in our directory.

Reports of the new service do not yet include reviews or performance metrics, but more information can be found at bMighty and CNET.

We continue to see new entrants to the cloud storage space, which brand new firms popping up seemingly each week. That said, it is starting to appear that delivering a profitable and effective service is harder than it looks – especially when you’ve got high expectations, as HP did for its Upline offering.

It appears that Upline is now set to be “Offline.” We first heard the story from the Technology Expert Blog, where the team reported that the Upline online storage service would be discontinued. It seems like a rather abrupt shutdown, but HP in indicating that it will refund all charges.

We covered the launch of Upline here back in April of last year. It turns out that there was some rocky performance along the way (as reported by TechCrunch and Enterprise Storage Forum), but we didn’t see this coming from a company that has the resources of HP.

Please let us know if you’ve got more details…