Copacetic

We’ve quietly put up a proper website for PutPlace.com in the fast few days and as it hasn’t fallen over, consider this a mild invitation to run over there and pre-register for the beta. You can do the survey to boot and help make the world a safer place for Digital Content.

What does PutPlace do? Helps you to find, organise, secure and share  that huge and growing pile of photos, video, music, emails, documents and blog content that is building up day by day on you PC, phone, laptop and Media Centre.

So run along over there and register and we’ll send you a private beta invite real soon now.

BTW: Some of you may have come across us by our previous name Secantus, same product different name. It happens, we’ve got over it, you should too

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.

S3 is a cool virtual disk service provided by Amazon. Unfortunately its only accessible via an API so mere mortals don’t get a lookin. Thankfully Jeremy Zawodny has compiled a list of list of backup tools that will give you access to the service.

S3 is priced at 0.15 USD per GB per month and 0.20 USD per GB of bandwidth consumed.

I’m just catching up on my blogs and the one thing that rocks my world is news of Amazon’s new web service EC2. They’ve jumped the gun on Sun and Google to provide a global grid facility to anybody with a credit card. USD$ 0.10 (10 cents) an hour gets you,

… the equivalent of a system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth

You get prebuilt Linux instances to layer your own images on and free interconnect to your S3 storage.  We already use S3 so this is going to increase the security of our application, improve scalability and make it cheaper all in one go!

Total cost for a years worth of compute power 0.10 * 24 * 365 = USD$ 876. Moving stuff from out current hosted environment to our S3 storage was going to cost us a fortune but this could have a radical impact on our most significant cost, bandwidth, where’s that spreadsheet…..

TechCrunch reports on a new offering from Amazon called S3. S3 is a web-service that will allow developers to leverage Amazon’s backend infrastructure to provide low cost storage services to their customers. The pricing is,

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred

This compares very favourably with the competition. However there is an issue here for most users. Most of the competition use a flat fee model for a given amount of storage (e.g. IBackup charges you $9.95 a month for 5GB of space). This is the price you pay whether you use it or not. Amazon uses a variable pricing model that charges like a utility for the time period the storage was used and the amount of storage used for that period. This will not sit well with end-users who are uncomfortable using services where they cannot easily predict the costs.

This might fly for storage costs alone, but when you include bandwidth costs it becomes impossible to predict the final price. Ask any user how much bandwidth they consumed reading and writing files in the last day, month, year and you’ll find most people are pretty clueless (myself included).

The competition offers no bandwidth pricing or caps at the moment so you can expect their prices to drop in line with Amazon’s in order to compete. At that point Amazon will have to address their bandwidth pricing policy to stay in the game.

TechCrunch recently reviewed The Online Storage gang, a group of companies that provide online virtual storage using a variety of business models. While this was an interesting article I found it disatisfying from a number of perspectives,

• The article failed to normalise the pricing model so that a prospective purchaser could do a comparison between the different vendors offerings.
• They conflated the business models of pure virtual storage players (e.g. XDrive, Box.net), structured vendors (flickr, eSnips and Multiply), backup vendors (Mozy) and ISPs (GoDaddy).
• The comparision table was a flickr image and therefore difficult to read

So what distinguishes these different vendors and their relative marketing positions? As indicated above I would divide the market into four kinds of offerings,

• Virtual Storage Vendors: Virtual Storage vendors offer online disk space and price according to quota allocations. Their primary costs are related to spinning disks (see Nik Cubrilovic’s excellent analysis) which means power consumption, network bandwidth and collocation footprint and maintainance dominate the equation. Their revenue model is therefore strictly pay for use as it is hard to interject an advertising stream into a pipe of raw data. You can tell a Virtual Storage vendor by the fact that they will have a Storage Plan link somewhere on there front page, that details the rising scale of prices with increasing demand for storage. If virtual storage follows the model of local storage, reads will dominate over writes.
• Structured Storage Vendors: Structured storage vendors offer storage for a particular type of file (the most well known being flickr, but Glide is also a strong rising contender). They have a similar cost structure to their Virtual Storage companions but can augment their revenue with advertising. They therefore often use a Free+Premium model where the basic service is free and you pay for additional enhanced services. Bandwidth limits for free users are a useful model for these vendors as it allows them to easily predict future demand.
• Backup Vendors: Backup vendors are focussed on recovery from failure or deletion. They are in the insurance business and although most model their services like the virtual storage vendors their costs should in theory be substantially lower as in the backup model writes dominate over reads and these vendors should be able to utilise tape storage to dramatically reduce their data centre costs.

I have produced a comparison table that splits the vendors along these lines using the TechCrunch list as a starting point and adding a list of Remote backup vendors culled from a number of websites on the net.

The table is split into three groups Virtual Storage Vendors, Remote Backup vendors and Sharing/Structured Storage Vendors. I have not done much analysis on the structured storage vendors as a I don’t see those guys as the focus of this study which is trying to determine what price virtual storage is likely to be. More work on the Sharing guys may follow.

I’ve included three prototypical plans for 5, 10 and 20GB of storage. I should point out that even 20GB will barely store the average user’s music collection, never mind their photos. Yet, very few vendors (AllMyData is the notable exception) quote for disk space over the 50GB limit. I then map the vendor’s closest plan in each case and normalise the table to generate a comparsion column for 5, 10 and 20GB of storage. The data for 20GB is graphed on the graph tab for easy comparison.

Some interesting points to note,

• Virtual Storage parallels backup storage in price. The most expensive backup vendor (BackupCellar) is $500 more expensive per year that the most expensive Virtual Storage Vendor (iStorage). This shouldn’t be the case as backups storaged on tape have sub-cent prices per Gigabyte year compared to holding all the data online on a power hungry, failure prone spindle.
• The differential price between the mid-range and highest price vendors is over 75%. There is some serious price gouging going on here (yes I’m talking to you and you).
• The business Models are all identical. They all offer a storage plan and the concept of a remote disk. Only AllMyData has anything different to offer in terms of offering up storage on your local disk to reduce your cost of purchase. Their pricing is also so wildly out of line with the competition (in a good way) that you have to ask yourself if they might have made a miscalculation.

Of course the likelihood is that Google is going to put most of these vendors to the sword when the launch (if they launch?) their GDrive product.

Until then caveat emptor, it pays to shop around.