I second everything that Tom says with the one exception that I think our businesses will move towards the concept of having data on the wire, managed by professionals much quicker than most anticipate.

The scope to do this with NetApps is huge, all you have to do (ahem) is extend the campus network in a diverse fashion to 2 sites where somebody else is taking care of all those nasty details like aircon, power, floorspace, physical access, growth planning, etc. Also, specific to filers, is the ability to leave the NT admin bits, ie shares, domain security, user management etc with the business, leaving the provider to manage the lower level filer aspects, eg raid groups, disk replacement, upgrades and so on. You could include SLAs for virus scanning management, backups, replication, remote failover (netbios names etc), load-balancing.

Charge it back to the business at pennies per megabyte per month offering true transparency of cost. Where your business has multiple pesky business units who fight over allocation based charge back you could negotiate with the provider to bill the business units directly.

The outsource provider can then judge whether to add more filers, upgrade to later releases to get more scalability in one box and so on thus reducing their cost for provision.

Its going to happen - filers and desktop fileserving are a great technology and opportunity for this. The ket is to having the skills to perform all the offboard management at the outsource shop.

My tuppence, Al

----- Original Message ----- From: tkaczma@gryf.net Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Monday, February 14, 2000 7:21 PM Subject: Re: Storage Service Providers

Bruce,

On Mon, 14 Feb 2000, Bruce Sterling Woodcock wrote:

...

I'm curious if people on this list see this as a big area in the future?

Yes, but there are several problems than need to be overcome. One of these is bandwidth. There are dataco products that are sufficiently robust to provide acceptable access for small configuration files, bookmarks, single images, etc., but mass storage bandwidth isn't there. OTOH, I think that in the future there will be less data that you will need. With an almost certain advent of portable browser appliances you will not have a good reason to drag gigabytes of data around with you.

...

Is B2C storage going to catch on with home users with thin clients?

I think so.

...

Are any of you considering B2B storage at the businesses where you work?

No, and I don't think that this is a viable alternative right now. Let me qualify that. There are businesses right now that export their data to colo sites and hosting locations. That will most likely remain the case and in fact expand. However, I believe that businesses are still sceptical of relinquishing complete control over all of their systems and data. There are also security considerations which have not been well addressed yet. With time, it is likely that businesses will initially outsource/contract their IT support. Moving data/machines to locations operated by a different business is a natural progression from there as it tends to follow economies of scale.

...

Essentially, outsourcing your storage to a provider who gives you a storage line just like phone, electricity, or any other utility.

I see this, but the reliability, security, and speed of access is not there yet. In addition, we are still too tied to our globs of data.

Tom