Apple launched OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard on Friday and not only is it faster and smaller, but also adds a few new features and core services. But for many, the price of just $29 seemed to be the primary reason to upgrade.

So, were these really enough for people to rush out and buy the new OS?

Well, we know that Backblaze customers are early adopters, but considering nearly 1/4th of all Backblaze Mac customers have already upgraded to Snow Leopard – it seems Apple’s customers think the new Snow Leopard is a worthwhile upgrade.

Thinking about upgrading to Snow Leopard?
Read our short Snow Leopard upgrade page for Backblaze:
https://www.backblaze.com/snowleopard.html

One year ago I attended Cloud Camp, a gathering of early adopters of cloud computing. Primary questions there centered on: “How do we define cloud computing?

Last Thursday I attended GigaOm Structure 09 and the discussions were full of cloud computing success stories, explanations of deployments, insights about how to scale bigger, offerings of cloud services at various levels and more. Below I summarize my takeaways from the day’s events.

Is Cloud Computing Real or Just a New Term for Old Technologies?
The short answer: Yes.

Many of the concepts of cloud computing have existed for years: large datacenters, hosted servers, online service offerings (think Yahoo! Mail), and even multi-tenancy (in most mainframes.) In part, cloud computing is a packaging of these into a term renovated for today.

However, cloud computing is more than just marketing. It is both a business model and technological change for the providers and consumers of these computing services. While startups could have always avoid directly deploying hardware by paying a hosting provider, the ability to pay for usage rather than signing year-long contracts dramatically changes the playing field when launching a new service with unpredictable demand.

What are the Tiers of Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing is standardizing on three key tiers:
* Infrastructure-as-a-Service
Amazon Web Services‘ EC2 and S3 are primary examples in this category where raw computing power such as processing and storage can be rented. GoGrid, Nirvanix, Rackspace, Savvis, and 3Tera are other examples. Some of these offer the infrastructure as a web-service, where you simply purchase “1 GB of space.” Others offer a hardware-as-a-service model in which you actually specify how many servers you want and how they are configured. Control versus the desire for hands-off outsourcing will drive which of these two models is ideal for your organization.

* Platform-as-a-Service
Google AppEngine, Force.com, and Microsoft Azure are primary examples in this category where a hosted development environment is provided upon which applications can be built and the underlying hardware is abstracted out. These platforms are ideal for developers wishing to get products to market quickly, but lock-in to the platform can be a concern. Some vendors are attempting to offer the ability to use standardized frameworks that could be portable, but this is in its infancy. Facebook Platform is also an example of a platform-as-a-service, though one in which applications would be deployed only within the Facebook experience rather than on the public Web.

* Software-as-a-Service
Examples of this category are all around us: online banking, Yahoo! Mail, Google Apps, and, of course, Salesforce.com.

What level should you engage in? As a consumer, the answer is obvious: you are simply a user of numerous software-as-a-service offerings. As a developer, you may choose to build upon an infrastructure-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service, depending largely on your desire to tradeoff control versus speed of deployment.

Will there be a Segmentation Amongst Clouds?
Scale is a critical component of clouds since the ability to scale up and down quickly relies on having both a large deployment and multiple-tenants across which spikes are smoothed out. However, companies consuming cloud services may have differing requirements that would push vendors to offer different clouds types. A basic examples of this segmentation is the different size server instances offered through EC2. However, other possible needs include quality-of-service guarantees, HIPAA or SAS70 compliance, or specific geographic or hardware requirements.

We are already starting to see cloud differences appearing:
* Amazon focuses on a broad-based offering.
* Nirvanix focuses on clouds for enterprises.
* RackSpace focuses on customer support.

Will clouds segment? Yes, but likely into a handful of major sites that still allow for the scale required to extract the benefits of cloud computing.

Does Cloud Computing mean the end of Scalability Issues?
Startups bringing the next high-definition-video-social-network may become wildly successful and require quickly scaling to millions of users. Cloud computing purports to easily address this by enabling these companies to simply add servers and storage as quickly as they are needed. While this may seem to solve all scalability issues, developers that have dealt with scale in the past understand that the fundamental architecture of the application needs to be developed to handle scale issues and cannot purely rely on scaling hardware.

If a program requires significant computation and the code is written to allow parallel processing, adding CPUs in the cloud can enable the computation to happen much quicker. Alternatively, if the code were written single-threaded, no amount of extra hardware will help speed the process. Cloud computing may reduce the need for system administrators on staff, but it does not negate the requirement for top-tier engineers.

And Finally, is Cloud Computing Inevitable?
Cloud computing is certainly in a phase of dramatic growth, with vendors providing new offerings and customers experimenting and adopting. There is no doubt that this trend will continue due to the benefits of scale, cost, operations, and segmentation of skill-sets. However, it is not inevitable that everything will move to the cloud. Certain organizations will have needs that are too custom-tailored to create a segmented cloud and will retain their internal systems – potentially building a ‘private cloud’. Of course, companies should evaluate the pros and cons for their own environments and for most there are likely many opportunities to move applications into the cloud and derive significant benefits.

Cloud service are forecast to be a bright spot amidst dire economic times. Reaching $56.3 billion by end of 2009, cloud services are expected to generate 2x the revenue of Google (which is partially included) and a growth rate that exceeds the company’s 18% year-over-year rate. By 2013, Gartner expects cloud services to reach $150 billion in sales.

Revenues from cloud application services (such as Backblaze) “were almost twice as large as the market for systems infrastructure and will continue to show strong growth,” according to the Gartner report.

While there is a lot of discussion about terminology and taxonomy (“cloud services” vs “SaaS” etc.)…there is no doubt the market for infrastructure and applications provided over the Internet has arrived.

Kodak Gallery, formerly known as “Ofoto”, claims to be the leading online digital photo developing service. Customers upload photos to the site, use it as a way to store and share photos online, and count on it as a photo backup.

However, today Kodak updated its storage policy to say that it will delete your photos if you do not purchase products from the company each year. Specifically, every 12 months customers storing:
* Less than 2 GB of photos need to purchase at least $4.99
* More than 2 GB of photos need to purchase at least $19.99
With a $100 digital camera shooting at 8 megapixels, just 500 compressed photos or 40 uncompressed photos would take you over the 2 GB limit.

Kodak Gallery provides a good photo developing service and should be able to charge for it. However, if you are counting on this as a backup of your photos – think again. Forget to purchase your minimum requirement one year? Bought your minimum, but then added some more photos and went over 2 GB? Your photos may be deleted.

Kodak Gallery’s terms of service say,

“You should keep a copy of each image you upload in a secure place. We are not responsible for deleted images.”

Ensure your photos are safe, in a secure place, forever. Back them up with Backblaze.

Online backup service provider Carbonite was all over the news this week for suing two of its suppliers, claiming the vendors setup the systems that were responsible for losing 7,500 customers’ data. First published in The Boston Globe, the story was picked up by TechCrunch, Computerworld, Cnet, and at least 20 other media outlets.

A large number of users losing their data certainly makes for good headlines and stories about the risks of cloud computing, but I think there is a different story here.

Carbonite’s CEO complained the media response was overblown. He claimed, correctly, that the majority of these reports were misleading. While 7,500 customers’ data was lost, only a small percentage of users (54 in total) actually lost data because this data was a backup and most people still had the the files on their computers.

Numerous articles also used this as an opportunity to raise doubts about using “the cloud” in general. Again, this seems to be a red herring. As a whole, cloud computing is generally more available and reliable than systems users put in place themselves. What’s more, backup is the ideal cloud computing application because it adds to the reliability by having data offsite that you already have locally.

What was missed in the news is that a company who’s core business is to provide online backup outsourced their online backup. Carbonite hired a system integrator, and now by suing this vendor, they are effectively denying responsibility for the backup systems.

This would be the equivalent of Google outsourcing search technology.

Building robust online backup technology is difficult. There are certainly lots of complexities involved to ensure data is backed up, redundant, and secure. It is the role of the online backup service provider to have the technical expertise and laser focus to work through these items. Pushing it off on an outside company just seems a bit …risky.

Update: After writing this post, David Friend, CEO of Carbonite, emailed me to state that while they purchased the Promise Technology boxes from system integrator, Interactive Digital Systems, they now write their own software.

Ma.gnolia.com was a bookmark storing and sharing service (similar to Delicious.com) that has shut down due to data loss. The company started several years ago and built a small, but adoring user community that liked Ma.gnolia’s easy-to-use API and caching of linked pages. The service was the work of Larry Halff who nearly single-handedly built the service.

Alas, as for many companies without a good backup, data loss caused a mortal wound: Ma.gnolia completely shut down on February 17th, 2009.

Larry explained that when he started the company several years ago, no good cloud-based backup services existed, thus requiring him to develop his own backup. The backup was doing a file sync over Firewire to another computer. Unfortunately there was no integrity checking, no versioning, and the system was never tested to see if the backups worked. When it came time to restore, it turns out they did not.

People often assume simply setting up a copy or sync process is sufficient for backup, only to discover the issues with this when a restore is needed. At Backblaze, every file is compressed, encrypted, de-duplicated, and integrity-checked to ensure the backed up file exactly matches the original.

Larry intends to develop a new service and says when starting the new company, “My first priority is better backups.”

We wish Larry the best with his new service and hope others benefit from Larry’s pain.

HP is shutting down its Upline online backup service
No official announcement has been made, but HP has sent its users a notice (shown below) saying it will shut down the service on March 31st. TechCrunch has reported about previous trouble the service had and the current shutdown.

Backblaze is offering HP Upline users a special 20% one-time discount
With this discount, the Backblaze service is over 30% less than HP Upline. HP Upline users can switch to Backblaze by purchasing with coupon code “upline2backblaze” by March 31st, 2009. Sign-up now >

Start your backup now to ensure there is no interruption in your data backup.

Email sent to HP Upline customers:

Thank you for your interest in HP Upline.

HP continually evaluates product lines and has decided to discontinue the HP Upline service on March 31, 2009.

HP will no longer be backing up your files to the HP Upline servers as of Feb 26, 2009 at 8 am Pacific time. HP will keep the file restore feature of the Upline service operational through March 31, 2009 Pacific time in order for you to download any files you have backed up to Upline.

If you have a paid subscription to HP Upline, you will be refunded the full amount of the fees you paid for the service. That refund will be credited to the credit card account or PayPal account that you used to subscribe to the Upline service. If you do not receive the refund prior to March 31, 2009, please contact our customer service team at https://www.upline.com/support/email.aspx.

HP looks forward to offering you additional technology products and services in the future.

Thank you.

HP Upline team

Broadband connections in the United States are 10 times slower than those in South Korea. In fact, we are number 15 based on average connection speed, behind not only Japan, Finland, France and Sweden (which are all at least 3 times faster) but also countries including Iceland, Poland, and Portugal that are blessed with significantly faster connections.

Cloud computing, VoIP, eCommerce, Internet TV, telemedicine, telecommuting, distance learning and a myriad of other drivers of communication, business, and social benefit rely on fast, accessible, reliable broadband connectivity.

Published on Friday, The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provides grants to service providers to build out broadband infrastructure in unserved and underserved areas. Grant requirements include mandated speeds of:
* Advanced Broadband Services: 45 Mbps downstream, 15 Mbps upstream
* Basic Broadband Services: 5 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream

Under this definition of basic broadband service a user could download 1.5 TB and upload 300 GB of data in one month – enough to watch a movie a night, download hundreds of photos or songs a day, backup an average computer online, and still have room to work remotely and do some video-conferencing.

Part of this Bill requires “a plan for use of broadband infrastructure and services in advancing consumer welfare, civic participation, public safety and homeland security, community development, health care delivery, energy independence and efficiency, education, worker training, private sector investment, entrepreneurial activity, job creation and economic growth, and other national purposes.”

History shows that connectivity not only links us in ways that are obvious at the outset, but drives innovation that is beneficial and unforeseen.

So will we have fast nationwide broadband tomorrow? Of course, not. Within a year of the passage of this Bill, a national broadband plan is required to be created. Best case is another year or two before individuals and businesses see available connections. This plan will not put the U.S. on par with South Korea, but it is a good step forward, and within several years we may start seeing the benefits of the broader availability of faster broadband.