Figuring out the future in storage

FREE, ONLINE, REMOTE: whichever way you cut it, it's not your grandfather's storage these days.

To get the inside track - clever pun there -- we caught up with Josh Coates, a veteran of the University of California, Berkeley, Microsoft Bay Area Research Centre, Inktomi and the Internet Archive, and now president and founder of hot remote storage startup Mozy.com.

Q. With AOL having formally announced free online mass-storage strategies and many others including Microsoft and Google expected to follow suit, how do you view what's going on out there?

A. With over half the households in the US having broadband, remote data access is becoming relatively easy. The big-name companies know the remote backup industry is broken. We are seeing both big and small companies respond with two types of online mass-storage strategies: remote hard disks and remote backup. Remote hard disks are relatively simple "storage locker" type of systems, which typically allow web access, sharing and manual backup of files. Remote backup services tend to be more focused on data protection and automation rather than sharing.

I see the primary challenge with both of them is scaling to support millions of users. Simple arithmetic shows that any large-scale deployment of these services requires many petabytes and gigabits. The economic and operational implications are staggering -- but through innovation, they are attainable and profitable.

Q. Will the big names outsource these storage infrastructures to specialists?

A. I predict some big names will look to outsource, others will look to partner and others may investigate building it in-house. I think a lot of it depends on the culture and technical resources of each of the particular 'big names'.

Q. What do you expect to be the successful and unsuccessful monetisation strategies?

A. There are really two main strategies: freemium and pay. The freemium model is simply making a useful subset of the service available at no cost, and offering an upgraded (premium, hence freemium) version of it for a price. The pay model is the traditional 'pay-to-play' business model, typically seeded with a 'free' 15- or 30-day trial.

Q. What do you think of the Apple and Microsoft attempts to build in real-time backup and versioning into their operating systems?

A. I think it's great. With desktop drives as big as they are, storing snapshots of file versions locally is a good use of the extra space. It's not a backup solution (if your disk fails, it's all over) but it's a convenient built-in utility to manage file versions.

Q. The enterprise Storage Service Provider model struggled for acceptance at the turn of the decade -- is it bouncing back?

A. I'm not so sure. The SSP model, or storage as a utility is a tough one. I think the ASP model is what we may be seeing here -- specific applications, like backup or archiving rather than renting LUNS over the wide area. But I don't think the SSP vision is ready to be realised quite yet.

Q. Will online storage be more of a business or consumer phenomenon?

A. There is no reason it can't be both. Consumers want two things: to keep their data safe, and to share and access. Businesses just want their data safe. Cheap disks and cheap broadband are enabling both of these to be realised.

Q. What comes next for your firm?

A. Continue building the best backup service in the world, and back up every home and office PC in the world. We're currently developing a Mac version of Mozy as well as a corporate version for small/medium businesses.

Q. When do you come out of beta?

A. We think we'll be ready by Q3.

Q. What are your international plans?

A. From the beginning, we have planned to globalise our service. Our system supports UTF-8 (which is no easy task I might add), so in the near future, when the time is right, we'll expand to support languages other than English. Already though, we have tens of thousands of users from all continents.

Q. How are power/heat concerns and defence against terrorism/acts of god affecting the way storage datacentres are located and protected?

A. Obviously, as computing and storage density increase, the power and heat management of datacentres becomes a primary economic factor. I think datacentres are ripe for innovation. In terms of defence and economy, I think it's clear that the big companies are thinking ahead. Both Microsoft and Yahoo are building datacentres in stable, remote regions like Idaho.

Q. How did ‘Father of NetWare' Drew Major get involved in your firm?

A. I met Drew back in 2002 when he was working on some new content-delivery technologies, and we reconnected when I moved to Utah two years ago. "Solving the backup problem" was on his list of things to do, but he was already doing two other startups, so he did the next best thing -- help fund mine.

Q. In the 1990s, firms like WordPerfect, Novell and Caldera made Utah a tech hotspot -- how about now?

A. Utah certainly has roots in this regard, but it feels like it's skipped a generation (in internet years) and has lost track of its roots - but there is an enormous amount of potential energy in this area and I think it's finding itself again. µ