Copacetic

The following is a update on a previous review I did of virtual storage and backup vendors backup in March 2006. I’ve limited the set of vendors to those offering pure play virtual storage and those focused on pure play network backup. This excludes offerings from the photo sharing sites (Flickr, PhotoBucket et al), hosting vendors (e.g. GoDaddy) and social networks (MySpace and Bebo). I’ve also excluded those who are currently in beta and are not advertising price plans or business models.

Since I did the original survey the whole virtual storage market has exploded with rumours of both Microsoft and Google entering the fray, new entrants raising significant VC and a dramatic drop in prices for the major players.

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The companies surveyed are summarised below, this is somewhat arbitrary selection based on Mike Arrington’s original Virtual storage review and my own experience of the space.

• AllMyData: Pure Play virtual storage with the added benefit of being able to share your own internal storage in order to contribute to the AllMyData storage grid. You get back what you offer on a roughly 10 to 1 basis i.e. for each 10MB of local storage you donate you get 1MB of secure virtual storage. This is a nice plan but it depends a lot on end-user trust. Tricky sell, when the world is telling you how unsafe the Internet is. Still benefits from being the cheapest kid on the block in terms of overall storage costs, regardless of whether you contribute to the grid or not. Their costs are probably dependent on a substantial proportion of their users contributing to the grid. Good luck guys!
• Streamload/MediaMax: Used to be called StreamLoad but are rebranding as MediaMax. There plan is to be your personal online media host. To this end they offer a whopping 25GB free for all registered users. BUT read the not so small small print. File sizes are capped at 25MB for the free plan (no storing your videos or DVDs please) and you can only download 1GB a month. So don’t expect to stream directly from here into you home wireless network (well not for more than a few hours). The pay-for-storage plans remove the file size restriction and increase the download limits per month to 10GB (premium), 25GB (elite) and 100GB (professional). Hmm, is it cooler to be elite or professional, oh the agonies of market segmentation.
• Amazon S3: I include S3 purely as a  price mark as it is just and API for developers at the moment. However ,while the ordinary Man in the street can’t use S3 directly, Jeremy Zwadony has collected a great list of S3 providers that you can download and attach to your S3 account. Most are free. The stinger with S3 is the bandwidth charges. Most of the other virtual vendors ignore the bandwidth costs because end-users can’t grok them, but Amazon wants other people to hide those costs for end-users (i.e. people like me). Still for the security of a big name vendor combined with a great price, S3 is hard to beat.
• Xdrive: XDrive was one of the bad boys in our previous survey coming in at a whomping $100 a year for 5GB of storage. However AOL obviously shook some sense into them and now you can get the same 5GB absolutely free. They also have a nice downloadable client that setups another labelled drive for access just like windows explorer. This is great for windows users, but the absence of FTP, WebDav or other access mechanisms means this client must be installed before you can use the software. This can be a pain if you are away from your own PC, and of course Mac users need not apply.
• Box.net: One of the first of the “new boys”, first with an API, first with a chunk of free storage (1GB) and recently in receipt of a nice chunk of change from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. You gotta love box.net who just do storage plain and simple. A big cheer for the little guy!
• iBackup: One of the old school (I was an iBackup customer until XDrive started throwing 5GB chunks around the place like confetti), iBackup’s strengths are in ubiquity of access. HTTP upload, FTP, WebDav, you name it they do it. This means they work real pretty with those lonely in the corner platforms like Linux and OS-X (the Mac O/S). Of course, they just can’t get used to the fact that somebody kicked the stool from under the virtual storage market so their prices (although dropping) haven’t kept pace with market trends. Still I bet they have a whole pile of incumbent customers paying top dollar ($20 per GB per year) who haven’t heard the news.
• Strongspace: Virtual space for superman surely! Strongspace people are big into security and won’t tolerate a virtual vendor that even considers using ftp. SFTP only Ma’am and you’d better know your gibibytes from your gigabytes. Of course all this security comes at a cost and with prices like $15 per month for 5GB (doh! I mean Gibibytes) maybe they are targetting the DoD as a potential customer. The rest of us should consider a lower priced vendor.
• iStorage: Now to make StrongSpace look cheap you have to get up pretty early in the morning. That’s no problem for theses fellas. They stayed up all night drinking so as to make StrongSpace look like good value. Each time I do this I have to double check my figures and gasp in awe and the audacity of these bad boys. Oh, hold on, wait a minute, now I get it, THEY’RE HARDWARE MANUFACTURERS. I can just see the meeting where the head of sales say “make sure those software boys don’t undercut our overpriced but lucrative disk business”. Don’t worry buddy, they didn’t.
• Fluxiom: You are taking the piss, no come on now, this is a satire site! The fact that you price your storage per MB ($36 per MB per Month) should be a giant RUN AWAY sign for anybody who comes near your service! I couldn’t even put you on the graph because all the other vendors disappeared in comparison.

There are a host of other services emerging as we speak. OmniDrive and MyFabrik to name two and of course if Microsoft and Google make good on their network hints then we could be in for some craic. Expect more upheavals in the near future as the Virtual Storage Vendors try and morph into network backup vendors and vice-versa.

The full table of price comparison data is available.

Next week, Network backup vendors.

Amazon continues to move away from book selling. After S3 and EC2 along comes fulfilment, They will store and ship your stuff. Great for power sellers.

Ogden  Nash : “People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.”

Ogden has obviously not had to call out a emergency plumber or glazer in Dublin recently….

These are rules I’ve gathered in my head over the past ten years. I can’t claim ownership of them all and I’m sure they have been articulated in many other places. A conversation at lunchtime about how hard it is to do commercial software development prompted me to do a brain dump.

By commercial software development I mean making a piece of software in order to sell it to many customers (as opposed to a handful) or to provide a service used by many customers.

1. 100-1: This a good ratio of end-users to developers to aim for as a starting point. With less than this you don’t get feedback and the feedback you do get will tend to take you in strange directions. Remember if you build a stadium you have to fill it every weekend to make a return, software works off similar ratios.
2. Build it - Then Sell it: The corollary sell it, then build it, is a different business, called consultancy. A Consultancy business doesn’t scale the way a software business does because you build a different product for each customer and sales is related to the number of associates you can recruit to do the heavy lifting. Building it means finding a niche and timing it just right so that the market is ready for your product. Irish software companies can build the stuff but their timing is usually off (they often suffer from being too early).
3. 6 months - 12 months: It takes 6 months to build anything worthwhile and it takes another 6 months to raise the quality to the level where you can let it out of the house without a curfew. But what if I hire really great people, I hear you say? Well if you hire really great people, then their and your ambitions will be greater too, so you end up building something more complicated which takes 6 months…
4. Show and Tell: Get the development team to demonstrate progress every week, by running a demo of the current code base. If they miss a week, then make doubly sure you get a full demo the following. Do it from a full install of the kit, not a development environment.
5. Build the Installer first: Installers keep you honest, stop you fudging development problems with patches, isolate you from the development environment and force integration early.
6. Project Plans are good: Microsoft project gets a lot of stick (and I’ve given it some myself in the past) but I can’t think of a better tool for giving you a ball park view of how long a piece of work is going to take. See a future post for how I plan. Remember the map is not the terrain, the best value of a plan is to be able to assess when half the time is gone, whether half the work is done.
7. Using is Testing: Unit test suits are good, automated test suites are good, user acceptance test suites are good, but there is no substitute for sitting down and using the product. Better still, get somebody else outside the team to sit down a use the product. One hour watching a novice user with a new piece of software is worth 24 hours of automated test.
8. Don’t extend the date - cut the features: You have to ship it, otherwise you end up like Vista or worse DECnet Phase V, constantly revising your feature set to meet changing customer requirements. XP has lots to say about this and its prioritisation mechanisms allow you to make cuts easily.
9. Fire the asshole:You have a team, its working pretty well, you have this one super guy, but hes a bit of an asshole, rubs people the wrong way, gets abusive when asked for help, schedules, dates etc. Get rid of him. Software development is a team activity.
10. Its a marketing function: Commercial software development is about supplying a customer’s unmet needs and/or desires. Its not about J2EE, Spring, Web-Services, Python, C#, Design patterns etc. etc. That is software engineering which is a sub-discipline of commercial development.

I bought (an extortionate) €7 WIFI card at the Crowne Plaza Hotel today, only to discover once I logged in that their WIFI firewall blocks access to POP and SMTP. So, its impossible to send an email or recieve one without logging into a web client.

As Basil Fawlty would say “What is the point of bleedin’ WIFI if you can’t get to your email“.
I left a complaint with desk, but I doubt it will make past front desk to anybody who can do anything about it…

Robert Cringely’s latest article Google On is more about IBM than Google. My IBM contacts tell me its burning up bandwidth all across IBM. Further to quote one insider (from an Irish perspective at least) ‘He nailed it”.

Here’s how he describes whats happening at IBM,

The heart of a company culture can be discovered if you look at the compensation system. IBM’s major incentives right now are for signing business and cutting costs. In many IT firms, IBM included, billable hours are important. This results in a system where little is done to improve service efficiency, because doing so would lead to fewer hours and less revenue. Efficiency kills, so at today’s IBM it is generally avoided.

Excellent advice with data to back it up.

Building a Web App? Don’t Forget the Premium Plan! - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals)

Blacknight provide an Irish ISP speed test for broadband users. Its pretty good in terms of user interface (requires Java as it’s an applet).
What I’d really like to see (and blacknight may provide this, I just haven’t found it yet) is a comparison across vendors and exchanges so that you can see how fast you are at home and in work and also compare your speed with neighbours, friends, colleagues etc. Then we could really see how the different broadband vendors compare in the trenches as opposed to on the marketing brochures.

I was checking the Alexa traffic stats for Flickr.com. Look at the huge spike in traffic in April.

What the hell is that about?

Check out the Yahoo Stats, it gets even weirder…

• Freshmeat announcement page (update : fixed borked link)
• Celtix Home Page
• Product page from the Iona Website
• The Celtix Demo page