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As Google Ponders Storage, Amazon Scores With VARs
10:25 AM EST Fri. Nov. 30, 2007
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The Amazon S3 infrastructure is a pure Web service, which is why companies like his can sell software that lets end users take advantage of the online storage capacity, said Jungle Disk's CEO Dave Wright.
"There's no Website or user interface to interface with it," he said. "So you need third-party software to use it."
Jungle Disk sells the software for $20 per user, primarily to consumers but increasingly to small businesses,
The company has a private-label version of its software for other service providers looking to offer on-line backup as a service, Wright said, but it was not designed for use by resellers.
However, he said, the company plans to launch a program in the first quarter of 2008 for solution providers and service providers who want to offer such a service. The product could be co-branded or white-labeled, with solution providers having a choice of letting their users sign up with Amazon S3 directly or packaging the Amazon S3 access as part of a complete service, Wright said.
The company plans to beta test a new version of its software designed specifically for small businesses and workgroups of up to 100 users with the ability to provide sub accounts and administration control, with production shipments scheduled for January, Wright said.
Elephant Drive, of Los Angeles, also uses Amazon S3 for online backups. However, said CEO Michael Fisher, it is only part of its storage infrastructure which also relies on commodity storage arrays plus a few high-end models for high-performance requirements.
"For us, Amazon S3 is a burst-management tool for when we get a surge in incoming data," Fisher said. "So it's a cash management tool because we don't have to invest in extra capacity."
Amazon S3 also serves as a poor man's content distribution network for Elephant Drive, Fisher said. For instance, in Europe, where the company does not have its own data center, customers can still load content there using the Amazon S3 infrastructure.
While Elephant Drive uses online backup as a way to attract end users, what keeps them is the data protection and data access the company offers, Fisher said. "Some customers use it to make data accessible anytime, anywhere," he said. "Some use it more like a disk drive."
Elephant Drive's software abstracts the location of the customer's data, Fisher said. "The data is held in multiple places, and not tiered at all," he said. "If you use our user interface and see three objects, one might be in an Elephant Drive data center, one in one S3 data center, and the third in another S3 data center."
While the read and write performance of data when using Amazon S3 is typically lower than for data stored on other arrays, the actual customer experience will vary, Fisher said.
"To the end user trying to upload a file, it might be transparent because their performance may be throttled by local bandwidth," he said. "Sometime's it's better when using an Elephant Drive data center, sometimes it's better from S3. Our software makes the decision from where to access data in real-time."
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