At the SNIA Winter Symposium

I've been busy attending the SNIA Winter Symposium this week. In addition to the usual XAM workgroup meetings, I've also been participating in the Cloud Storage Summit.

On Wednesday, the organizers were gracious enough to let me present a quick talk on Private Storage Clouds, where I covered the economic drivers behind cloud storage, the differences between public and private clouds, talked about how Bycast's StorageGRID software allows the creation of private clouds, and discussed some examples of customers where we are deployed and in production.

While I didn't have as much time as I would have liked, I was able to cover a majority of the points that I had planned to discuss, and the session was well received.

It's interesting to see how much surprise there was regarding how our system is being used by customers. Robin Harris of the Data Mobility Group called us the "most surprising company" based on what we have been doing. In contrast to most of the cloud storage deployments, many of our customers are placing mission critical data on our storage system, either for archive or primary storage, and they have no backups outside of the redundancy provided as an intrinsic part of StorageGRID.

During some of the other sessions, the data being stored on many other cloud deployments was described as being "data that could be lost", or "the garbage dumpster".

Thanks to an innovative use of WebEx, you can view all of the talks online at the cloud storage sessions page. I'd encourage you to have a look at these, as there is quite a lot of interesting material here, especially the views of the analysts from the Thursday sessions.