Google announced Monday that it has combined its free storage options across multiple apps, making it easier to manage how much space you're using in Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+. Previously users had to separately track the 10GB of free space allotted for Gmail and the 5GB of free space allotted for Drive. Now, they have 15GB of unified space to use among all the Google apps, and any additional storage they purchase can be used wherever it is most needed. 

To put these changes in perspective, Google offered a clear example: 

Maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2 GB in Gmail. Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want.

Check out a screenshot of the new storage management tool and soon-to-come storage option changes below: 

Today the race is on to virtualize all aspects of the data center. Dubbed the software-defined data center (SDDC) or sometimes software defined networking (SDN), SDDC is a market IDC projects will top $3.7 billion by 2016.

It's a hot market, too: just this week, Cisco, IBM, VMware, Red Hat and others have banded together under a Linux Foundation-hosted consortium called OpenDaylight. But while this is a significant step toward virtualizing the networking layer of the data center, it may simply be a prelude to the next phase of virtualization: storage.

VMware led the way in virtualizing servers in the data center, creating enormous value for its shareholders over the last decade. Originally acquired by EMC for $635 million in 2003, VMware is now a standalone company with a market capitalization of more than $30 billion. Last year it acquired a leading SDN startup, Nicira, for nearly $1.3 billion. That move scared a lot of data center vendors – primarily Cisco – who don’t want to see VMware dominate networking virtualization as completely as it came to own server virtualization.

Too often overlooked in all the billions of dollars sloshing around servers and networking competition in SDDC is the laggard, storage. Traditional storage is a $10 billion annual business, but until recently it hasn’t made much headway into virtualization.

That may be about to change. 

To better understand the trends shaping the rise of the software-defined storage play, I sat down recently with Dr. Kieran Harty, CEO of Tintri, makers of storage systems for software defined data centers, and one of a core virtualization pioneer. Harty ran engineering at VMware from 1999 to 2006 and his teams created the software products that virtualized the server side of the SDDC equation.

ReadWrite: Remind us again what VMware was trying to do a dozen years ago when your teams were focused on bringing virtualization to servers.

Harty: The basic problems virtualization solved back then we called server consolidation and over-provisioning. Business wanted to move compute workloads from large, costly, proprietary, single servers (usually Sun servers) running one application, oftentimes at only 10% of capacity, to clusters of cheap, commodity, Linux servers. VMware pioneered a technology called the hypervisor that allowed virtualization to make this possible – on the server.

ReadWrite: Today VMware enjoys roughly 90% market share in server virtualization. The spectacular success of server virtualization begs the big question of what comes next. Can the same benefits of virtualization on servers be applied to the rest of the data center?

Harty: This is what gives rise to the concept of the software-defined data center (SDDC) – a data center with infrastructure that is fundamentally more flexible, automated and cost-effective; infrastructures that understand application workloads and can automatically and efficiently allocate pooled resources to match the application demands. Rather than construct data centers full of over-provisioned and siloed resources, a SDDC would more efficiently utilize and share all aspects of the infrastructure: servers, networking and storage.

While servers, and to a lesser extent networks, have embraced SDDC, storage lags significantly behind and continues to cause a great deal of pain in the data center today. Fortunately, some of the key technologies that brought the sweeping changes to servers and networks are taking shape for storage.

ReadWrite: What kind of changes?

Harty: A quick look at some of the most successful disruptive technologies reveals that many of them “crossed the chasm” with the help of a few common key ingredients: standardization, hardware innovation and abstraction. In the case of server virtualization, the standardization of Intel’s x86 platform and the proliferation of the open source Linux operating system massively disrupted the server market. Armed with a new generation of multi-core processors and VMware’s hypervisor technology, server virtualization conquered the data center.  

Networks followed a similar path starting with TCP/IP standardizing the network protocol. Gigabit Ethernet increased transmission speed by an order of magnitude. OpenFlow, which set the foundation of an open and standards-based software-defined networking, paved the way for the most significant changes in networks in several decades. 

ReadWrite: What kinds of changes in standards, hardware innovation and abstraction are leading to disruption in the storage market?

Harty: For 20 years, little has changed in the world of legacy storage designed for physical environments. As data centers become more virtualized, there is a growing gap due to the complete mismatch between how storage systems were designed and the demands of virtual environments. It’s a bit like people who don’t speak the same languages and have a hard time understanding each other - storage speaks LUNs and volumes; servers speak VMs. 

As a result, they don’t understand each other very well. Storage allocation, management and performance troubleshooting for the virtualized infrastructure are difficult, if not impossible with legacy storage. Companies have tried to work around this obstacle by over-provisioning storage which is very expensive and increases complexity.

ReadWrite: Is there where flash technology enters and disrupts storage? Can we power through these legacy storage challenges with performance improvements that are an order of magnitude over those of traditional spinning disk?

Harty: Storage has always been about performance and data management. Flash removes the performance challenges and levels the competitive playing field for storage vendors. Flash enables very dense storage systems that can host thousands of VMs in just a few rack units of space. But flash by itself – without the intelligence – only gets us so far. 

And while some industry players are attempting to make virtualization products adapt to legacy storage through APIs, or retrofit legacy storage to become virtualization aware, neither goes far enough to bridge the yawning gap between these two mismatched technologies – you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig. What is needed to solve this problem is storage that has been completely redefined to operate in the virtual environment and uses the constructs of virtualization. In short, VM-aware storage.

ReadWrite: What do you mean, VM-aware?

Harty: Virtualized environments require storage designed for virtualization. Enterprises expecting to get the full benefit out of the software-defined data center need storage that’s simple and agile to manage, while delivering the performance required by modern applications. They will need storage that understands the IO patterns of virtual environments and that automatically manages quality of service (QoS) for each VM. 

We eliminate an entire layer of unnecessary complexity if we stop talking about LUNs or volumes. 

The broad adoption of virtual machines as the data center lingua franca gives us de facto standardization for software-defined storage. The rapid growth and declining cost of flash technology provides the hardware innovation. 

This leaves us with the one last essential missing piece – the abstraction between storage and VMs, an abstraction that understands VMs while being able to abstract and pool the underlying storage resources and deliver the benefits of simple, high performing and cost effective storage. We call that VM-aware storage.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Dropbox

Let’s start with the one maybe even your mother knows about: Dropbox. Founded in 2007 by Drew Houston, Dropbox got its early footing through startup incubator Y Combinator, launching a year later at TechCrunch50. It’s safe to say that while it certainly wasn’t first to the tech table in terms of using "box" in its name, it's come to represent the consumer file repository that many people think of as their personal flash drive in the cloud. After all, Houston came up with the idea one day when he forgot his USB thumbstick for a class at MIT. Following a number of acquisitions and steady growth - and a current valuation of around $4 billion - many in the industry speculate that Dropbox might go public this year.

Mailbox

Box

You can't any more "box"-y than Box. Founded in 2005 by Aaron Levie and longtime friend Dylan Smith, Box (originally Box.net) is often seen as the Dropbox for enterprises. In true startup fashion, it was incorporated while the two ran the whole thing out of Smith's parent's garage. The company now sits at a valuation between $1.2 and 1.5 billion. What does Box do that differentiates it from Dropbox? The companies seem to naturally cater to different bases: Box focuses on the corporate sector and its need for huge amounts of storage, while Dropbox puts its emphasis on raking in a huge pool of regular customers. Box is also planning an IPO in the near future, though early speculations are betting Dropbox will take the first-to-go-public crown. 

Outbox

Just last month, Outbox made its debut in San Francisco after a 6-month beta period in Austin, Texas. Another company trying to cash in on snailmail-meets-email, Outbox is the digital answer to the problem of junk mail, traveling and physical mailboxes. Basically, Outbox customers have their mail picked and scanned for them. But can Outbox truly disrupt the U.S. Postal Service? Is this a solution in search of a problem, and does anyone really want to pay someone to stand between them and their mail? Despite Outbox's best efforts to outline its insurance policy, many people still worry about the security issues of someone else opening their mail.

FuzeBox

But wait, there’s more! In the field of business-oriented voice and video conferencing, there’s Fuzebox. Founded way back in 1998 as CallWave, the Web- and mobile-based communication platform didn't begin calling itself Fuzebox until 2009 - after years of declining sales and falling stock. The rebranding seems to have helped, as the company now has a whole suite of video conferencing products - Fuze Meeting, Messenger, and Telepresence Connect. One positive sign: last week FuzeBox nabbed Skype's former director of product management. 

Xobni

Turns out there's more than one way to spell "box." Xobni is Inbox spelled backward. This Y Combinator-funded startup was launched out of a dorm room in Cambridge, Mass. in 2006 by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina. Xobni began as a plugin for Microsoft Outlook, giving users fast contact-based email search. After launching a public beta in 2008 and adding Yahoo! VP Jeff Bonforte as CEO, Xobni tried to overcome what many critics saw as performance issues with large inboxes and investors concerns of monetization. After Microsoft rejected a $20 million acquisition deal, Xobni was forced to revamp its applications under a new suite called Smartr. 

Boxee

Last but not least, we have Boxee, a company that has nothing to do with email, snail mail or cloud storage. In fact, Boxee's name is a take on the set-top box, and the company is a bundle of streaming devices, social-network software applications and a slew of other TV-based services that aim to help users rate, share and recommend all kinds of media. Launched into beta in 2008, Boxee didn't get its own hardware until 2010, when the Linux-based Boxee Box (wow!) was developed in conjunction with D-Link and released as an all-in-one media center equipped with a browser and a rather impressive app collection. Just last fall, Boxee stripped that down to Boxee TV, a more Roku-esque take on the simple streaming device. 

Guest author Ed Lee is lead architect for virtualized storage vendor Tintri.

Virtualization and flash memory are disrupting the staid storage industry. First embraced in slick consumer products like the iPod, flash memory is now the new darling of enterprise IT. One reason is speed.  Flash is more than 400 times faster than rotating disks.

The other reasons are virtualization and cloud computing. Combined, these technology trends have strained the capabilities of traditional storage products. Those big metal boxes of enterprise storage, called arrays, were originally designed in the 1980s - before MC Hammer rocked parachute pants. Today’s input/output storage requirements are heavier and far more random than storage designers could have predicted 30 years ago. And with new technology comes new problems. IT systems that once hummed, “Can’t Touch This,” became hung up by traffic jams. With the highly random I/O of modern virtualization, flash trumps even the best spinning disks.

Well, nothing gets venture capitalists writing checks faster than IT managers with large budgets wringing their hands in frustration. So, enter the flash solutions from enterprise storage startups. Even the incumbent dinosaurs are showing some hustle. Just last spring, storage industry giant EMC's dropped an impressive $400 million to snap up XtremIO, a three-year-old flash company that has yet to ring up a single sale.

Too Much Flash?

So has flash been over-hyped? Yes, of course it has. Most promising new technologies are overhyped, but the best survive the disappointment that is sure to follow. The problem with most of the flash crowd is that they tout it as a cure-all for IT's performance woes – like a magic medicine show, it puts the performance back in your data center. But it's not magic. It does one thing really well - it eliminates contention for disk spindles. But flash by itself does nothing to ease storage management burdens, and in fact may actually contribute to increased infrastructure complexity. 

Like all new technologies, flash-based storage systems need to be designed into complete solutions rather than just point products.   

Speed Isn't Enough

Today, flash is central to nearly every next-generation storage solution coming to market. But smart IT managers know that speed alone doesn’t solve all of their storage problems, especially in a world of virtualization and cloud computing. In fact, flash-based vendors that offer systems that simplify storage management provide a much greater boost to IT performance than just making I/Os go faster.

Like many incremental improvements in component technologies – even order of magnitude performance boosts like flash – are too often hijacked by legacy vendors to create incrementally smaller and faster versions of the same old products. Don’t be blinded by flash. It’s cool, but it needs to be integrated with new approaches to building complete solutions.

Expect the enterprise storage conversation, pushed by the new demands of virtualization and cloud computing, to move beyond flash. It’s not just about the speed; it's about the solution.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The Internet has evolved from a virtual buffet of content to a hyper-connected network of people and things creating massive amounts of information. Businesses continue to struggle finding ways to store all this data in a way that makes it available anywhere and anytime it’s needed.

Historically, adding storage space was measured in the number of devices and the capacity of the media. From tape, to floppies, to optical media, to hard drives, to USB drives... storage technology continues to improve and the prices continue to drop. The market for storage is expected to rise to $37.3 billion by 2015, according to forecasts by analyst firm IDC. But there never seems to be enough.

The modern trend of what IDC calls the “slow and deliberate,” use of cloud-based storage has created a different paradigm - one that challenges those managing information on the Internet. People around the world create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. And the company estimates that 90% of all data in the world was created in the last two years.

To keep up, businesses have been forced to act like squirrels preparing for winter, putting bits of personal and public customer information hither and thither, loosely tied together as a patchwork of devices and services. Too often, companies complain that storing information online is limited by the boundaries between providers, an inability to react to growing demands and services that are complex to manage and slow to install.

This is why companies like Hewlett-Packard have adopted a multi-layered approach that simplifies the process of storage for business. HP’s Converged Storage Systems and Services takes advantage of the trends of storage technologies to provide an easy method for application integration, virtualized infrastructure and cloud services.

The suite’s current lineup includes

• HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage
• HP StoreOnce Backup with StoreOnce Catalyst
• HP StoreAll Storage
• HP StoreVirtual Storage
• HP StoreEasy Storage
• HP StoreVirtual VSA

HP Storage Addresses Big Data

Even before the inclusion of magnetic-card storage in the HP 9100A desktop calculator (personal computer) in 1968, Hewlett-Packard used storage media to address the data being created by its business customers. The latest technology trend of so-called Big Sata has put unprecedented pressure on storage strategies and technologies. It's also delivering unprecedented benefits to the companies of all sizes that are able to leverage Big Data with systems on site or in the cloud.

For example, the HoneyBaked Ham company uses a consolidated suite of HP storage systems to track customer data and transactions. The company reports improved performance in creating reports and providing information to executives.

Other sectors taking advantage of HP’s storage suite include healthcare, media and entertainment, financial services and public sector industries.

HP Storage Taps Into The Cloud

As cloud computing has emerged as a basic networking practice, more and more content is stored in virtualized, interconnected storage devices. Not only does this make it possible to access massive files from anywhere at any time, it also makes storage more affordable, efficient and easier to manage.

One customer that knows about accessing massive files is Hostworks, which used HP’s cloud computing storage products to assist Australia's Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) in its tracking of fan traffic during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Using HP's cloud service, Hostworks recorded 1.5 million unique visitors, more than 25 million page impressions and two million video views as well as tracking matches and featuring up-to-the-minute information on the competition.

HP Storage Empowers The Datacenter

Converged storage systems don’t sit under the desktop, they support large data centers, storage arrays, and dedicated data stores. Providing timely access to information has become paramount for companies and storage service providers alike. One of the latest trends is to use solid-state devices to supplement datacenter storage to speed up all applications by replacing or augmenting memory caches. HP is no stranger here, having championed solid-state drives since 1993 with the advent of the HP Omnibook 300.

More recent implementations of SSD drives have helped companies maximize the effectiveness of their existing datacenters. For example, Priceline.com - one of the world’s largest online hotel reservation and travel services - doubled its datacenter capacity and service speeds with HP’s converged storage products. More compact HP hardware with solid-state storage and HP software to manage the systems was installed, resulting in a 65% decrease in the space needed to run the storage array.

As trends go, storage has never been sexy, even by enterprise IT standards. But it’s importance in handling new technology trends such as Big Data, cloud computing and virtualization - as well as its ability to make datacenters more efficient - cannot be ignored. Hewlett-Packard’s Converged Storage Systems and Services has helped thousands of enterprise IT leaders make their companies leaner, more agile and more efficient. Enterprise storage needs are unlikely to become smaller, or less important, so it's important to know that companies like HP are already working to meet those requirements.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

One small developer says that he's readied an open-source alternative to Microsoft's exFAT file system, providing companies and individuals with a free alternative to Microsoft's file system for flash drives.

Over the weekend, developer Andrew Nayenko announced fuse-exFAT 1.0.0, completing three years of development on the project. Tarball archives have been posted to Google's code site, where they can be compiled for GNU/UNIX based operating systems and Apple's OS X.

And that could mean a loss of revenue for Microsoft, which has been busy licensing its exFAT file system to a number of companies. Last week, for example, Microsoft licensed the exFAT tech to automaker BMW for an undisclosed amount. It has signed similar deals with Aspen Avionics, Canon, Panasonic, Research In Motion, Sanyo and Sony.

Why Is This Important?

A file system manages the locations of computer files stored on a drive; in Windows, for example, PCs have used the NTFS file system since the days of Windows 2000. (Microsoft planned to include a new file system into Windows 8, called ReFS, but that system has been reserved for Windows Server.) Apple uses its own Hierarchical File System, with an improved version, HFS+, in OS X. 

The vast majority of consumers and businesses never have to worry about which format is used on which drive, as products like USB keys and external hard drives can be read by both Apple and Windows systems. Those external devices -  including the SD cards used by most consumer cameras - are typically formatted with a file system called FAT32.

But as cards themselves increase in file size, the file system's role becomes more prominent; for example, SD HD cards up to 32GB are formatted with FAT32. But for the newer SD XC cards, from 32GB on up to a (largely theoretical) limit of 2 terabytes, the SD Card Association has flipped over to the exFAT file system.

That's important in an increasingly connected world. In a statement, BMW's project manager for CE device connections, Gottfried Schmid, explained that “with the support of the trend-setting file system exFAT, BMW is able to significantly increase the number of compatible CE devices and Mass Storage devices for our customers.” But the license agreements Microsoft has signed cover a number of traditional camera and phone manufacturers that are seeking legal shelter.

The Legal Mess

It's still too early to tell whether Nayenko has managed to reverse engineer exFAT using open-source technologies, however. Microsoft hasn't divulged many details of the the exFAT file system; in 2009, the SANS Institute attempted to reverse-engineer the exFAT file system to enable forensic examination, such as sensitive images that may have been stored on a camera. Microsoft maintains a licensing page specifically devoted to licensing exFAT technologies, and company representatives declined to comment when asked if Nayenko's technology violated the company's patents.

Nayenko is presenting the exFAT file system as a FUSE model, a loadable kernel module that essentially serves as a bridge to the actual kernel interfaces. FUSE is licensed according to the GNU public software license.

The few people who are aware of Nayenko's release have begun asking whether or not businesses or other commercial entities interested in using fuse-exFAT within their own products may legally do so. Last year, Nayenko said that he didn't believe that Microsoft could touch him. "Fortunately U.S. laws are not worlds [sic] laws," he wrote in a message to the Google newsgroup.

On Tuesday, he took a more laissez-faire approach. "I don't know," Nayenko responded, when I asked to interview him about the legal standing of fuse-exFAT. "You should consult a lawyer. I run this project just for fun and don't care about patents because I'm not a U.S. resident."

It's easy to draw comparisons between fuse-exFAT and Linux, and the battles between the open-source community and Microsoft in the late 1990s. Linux, however, was designed as a new OS kernel, not as a clone of existing Microsoft technology. While Nayenko may have designed a version of the exFAT file system that truly exists independently of Microsoft, any company selling products based on fuse-exFAT within the United States will probably face a legal challenge from Redmond.

Image source: Flickr/Le ciel azure

Solid-state storage has become ubiquitous in mobile devices and increasingly in laptops as well. But it's also revolutionizing storage in corporate datacenters, cloud computing services and beyond.

Forget the portability factor, solid-state drives, or SSDs, are finding massive growth potential as a way for companies to speed up large-scale storage systems.

Historically, storage devices used in business have been either magnetic tape or hard disk drives, both of which spin, use a lot of energy and throw off a lot of heat (which usually requires expensive cooling).

SSDs, on the other hand, are much faster and more efficient, and generate much less heat - making them ideal for use in datacenters. The only reasons they haven't already become a direct replacement for rotating disks is due to their relatively high cost per gigabyte and the high volumes of data writing required in many datacenter applications.

Although SSD vendors try to engineer around these issues with advanced compression and deduplication techniques - as well as redirecting how and where data is stored - SSDs today essentially provide answers for limited use cases (e.g. small databases), but fall short when it comes to working with large loads of data. This includes the massive amounts of unstructured data that represents the bulk of storage growth today.

That said, the adoption of solid state storage as a complementary solution to standard hard disk (HDD) storage for enterprise applications continues to grow quickly. Worldwide solid state storage industry revenue reached $5 billion in 2011, a 105% increase from the $2.4 billion in revenue achieved in 2010, according to analysts at research firm IDC. SSD vendors are also giving enterprises and storage companies improved technical options. Some 18 million higher-capacity SSDs (ranging from 80GB to 512GB) will ship in 2013, and that number is expected to grow to 69 million units by 2016, estimate analysts with IHS iSuppli.

But if solid state drives aren’t going to kill off spinning hard drives or magnetic tape, where do all those SDD units fit into the storage ecosystem in efficient and cost-effective ways?

Today's Best Uses For SSD In Storage

Solid state drives are most useful for access to data that is needed fast but not in high volumes. SSD technology is also justifiable in applications where lag time or latency could mean lost dollars - such as in trading platforms and financial systems. These attributes also make SSDs valuable as the first line of access for cloud-based storage offerings. Data that needs to be accessed fast goes on the SSD, while less-critical data can be stored on more traditional slower, less expensive spinning disks. This arrangement lets cloud storage providers leverage SSDs along with other storage technologies to provide a broad range of services at the lowest cost.

“The challenge they are solving is that the IOPS (input/output - or I/O - operations per second) are superior in SSDs but the cost per gigabyte storage is orders of magnitude higher than rotational hard drives,” explains Sanjay Parekh, an early participant in solid-state-hard-drive-cloud-storage startup SolidFire. “They have developed a layer on top of SSDs that drive the effective storage cost down while maintaining high IOPS.”

As prices eventually come down, Parekh notes, SSDs should replace most other storage technologies. But there will always be a role for backup systems like tape and magnetic hard drives. A distributed system using multiple storage technologies is best for long-term data security, he adds, as it isn't wise to put all of your data on one storage medium.

Room To Grow With SSD

For now, using SSD as an acceleration tier on top of traditional storage can provide the best of all storage worlds. Relatively small, high-performance SSD units can be used to speed up all applications by replacing or augmenting memory caches.

“It instantly delivers performance on demand, while enabling hot data to stay on higher-cost SSDs and majority of data at rest to sit on well-protected traditional disk drives,” says Kirill Malkin, CTO of Starboard Storage. “That way, the SSD subsystem delivers performance efficiency and the disk subsystem optimizes capacity efficiency. Furthermore, using multiple SSD layers with varied performance and capacity characteristics enables highly effective, just-in-time I/O optimization for consolidating multiple applications on a single storage platform with right sized resources for every workload and use case. Notably, this approach requires a complete rethinking of the storage stack involving dynamic pooling of all resources and implementing performance controls.”

When used as a performance tier in a more traditional storage environment, SSD can extend the life of that architecture. But this kind of architecture is inherently inefficient because it involves heavy "shadow" transfers between the solid state and rotating storage devices, he adds. Successful "tuning" of such storage systems requires an intimate knowledge of the application behavior, making it more difficult to set up and use.

Given these issues, properly sizing the solid state storage tier can be very difficult, often ending up with significant over-provisioning to achieve the required performance target, Malkin adds. The SSD tiers in traditional storage systems architectures are often limited in the way they fit in with current complex storage systems or legacy RAID [redundant array of independent disks] controllers and RAID group management.”

Beyond SSD - What Does The Future Hold?

But for SSDs to take over the storage ecosystem, manufacturers will have to shrink the technology's price premium compared to traditional storage solutions. Today, an HDD might cost $0.24 cents per gigabyte, while an SSD could cost $2 or more per gigabyte. That's a hefty difference when you start talking about equipping large data centers with SSDs.

One way vendors have tried to balance price, capacity and performance is with multi-level cell (MLC) SSDs. However, due to their inherently low endurance, MLC-based SSDs quickly wear out in write-intensive uses. Another approach is TLC flash or triple-bit-per-cell flash SSDs - but the problem then becomes one of physics. Adding cells means shrinking the components smaller than 14 nanometers, making it difficult to manage and more of a work in progress than an actual solution to today's storage problems.

"Since SSDs became a viable option for the enterprise performance, cost and reliability have been critical points of evaluation. However, as IT purchasers begin to better understand the technology's strengths and weaknesses, we are seeing more importance placed on the balance between endurance and cost," according to John Scaramuzzo, president of SMART Storage Systems.

As an alternative, many companies are now considering hybrid storage systems. Hybrid systems combine spinning disk and SSD storage media to balance capacity and performance. Large-capacity hybrid storage devices can cost $500 a terabyte, making them appropriate for a single super-system but not necessarily as a way to cut costs in a large datacenter storage array.

For the foreseeable future, all types of storage formats will likely coexist, with SSDs added to traditional storage systems as the predominant model. (That's largely because of the large installed base and well-understood architecture of traditional storage systems.) Ultimately though, as SSD prices fall due to Moore's Law, experts expect the industry to gradually migrate to a world where all-SSD systems are used for a continually growing subset of applications. For workloads where SSD's performance improvements can't be financially justified, SSD-accelerated systems will continue to be used until the SSD price premium becomes insignificant.

With all the recent teeth gnashing about startup investment shifting from consumer to enterprise technology, it's worth noting that successfully cracking the enterprise market is no easy task:

• 70% of the U.S. economy hinges on consumer spending. Even with the pending fiscal cliff, it's kind of hard to ignore the numbers. 
• Enterprise technology is not a short game.

Unlike most consumer technologies, enterprise infrastructure and applications run on a much longer upgrade cycle: 5-7 years. While you might ditch your smartphone every year or two for a newer model, few companies are willing to swap out their CRM systems, storage or security technologies that quickly.

Switching behavior is both the most complicated and important subject in the enterprise technology market. Even if enterprise customers have good reasons to be unhappy with their technology vendors (e.g., lack of innovation, price gouging, poor support), their business runs on that technology. This makes them highly incentivized to see existing vendors address any issues and continue the relationship. As we all know, moving's a bitch.

Of course, enterprise tech is a rich, rewarding game, so it's worth exploring the strategies startups can use to overcome the barriers to switching in the enterprise market:

1. Transformational Technologies. The ultimate startup is the one that changes the game on an incumbent in such a way that the latter neither can block nor retaliate. Classic examples include Virtualization and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Because virtualization decouples compute functions from hardware (while running on top of the hardware), it is the ultimate disruptor because it's non-invasive. SaaS eliminates the stickiness of packaged software - and the lucrative support contracts that go along with it. Interestingly, while there tend to be many attackers in Virtualization and SaaS, only a few players tend to win big. Very big: witness VMware and Salesforce.

2. Changing Product Cycles. Catching technology giants in product transition cycles is one of the most effective ways to insert new technologies. However, this usually requires an outside force to speed insertion. Earlier in my career, Intel Centrino drove the need for enterprise Wi-Fi and forced an architectural change. In 2013 you can see many great examples of this idea, including Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, ServiceNow and Workday. These transition cycles don't last forever, though. Over time the incumbents typically build or buy their way into the new product segment and the situation stabilizes until a new cycle begins.

3. Trojan Horses. Sometimes a new enterprise IT category emerges in an indirect way. Cloud infrastructure eliminates the need to buy IT hardware and software; the rental model emerged as form of shadow IT for specific projects that could not wait for corporate IT to respond. It also became the preferred approach for brand new businesses (Netflix streaming). Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, two big early winners in cloud computing, sell computing cycles by the month, payable with with a credit card - often bypassing traditional IT purchasing processes. Once established, Cloud and SaaS vendors can then turn their attention to selling to mainstream IT.

4. New Buying Centers. The multi-hundred billion-dollar enterprise IT game now pivots on competition for the IT "stack," as we shift from the Client-Server/Web mobel to cloud computing. This change has created a new class of IT decision makers such as the "cloud architect." As companies move more to the cloud, this new IT leadership category drives key decisions for enabling new applications, also driving the buying all of the underlying IT components. And these new buyers may not be as wedded to the incumbent suppliers as were the decision makers they supplant.

5. The Consumerization of IT. The iPhone led to a watershed change both in enterprise mobility and computing. Not only did it challenge corporate purchasing patterns ("I buy, you enable," also known as BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device), it eliminated a final barrier to what constituted a business device. This is less about "consumerizing" enterprise IT, but rather, adapting enterprise IT to leverage consumer technologies. In addition to mobile devices, apps are challenging the application market for business software.

6. Coalitions of the Willing. For most small companies, hiring a large enterprise sales force and entering a year-long acquisition cycle is likely to be an expensive exercise in futility. Sure, you might be able to make a living selling to universities, hospitals and niche verticals, but attacking the Fortune 500 requires friends who need another reason to re-engage in a selling conversation. Manufacturing and strategic partnerships with hardware makers made a lot security companies rich during the client-server era (e.g., McAfee, Symantec). Today, companies like Box are changing the game through new kinds of partnership integrations.

Frontal assaults are the hardest attack strategy for an enterprise startup. Attacking a powerful technology company's profit sanctuary tends to piss them off. If you can pull it off, it might just get your company acquired, but run a big risk of perishing in the attempt.

That's why this tends to be the strategy of large companies (e.g., HP's acquisition of 3Com to attack Cisco) and does not have a great track record. The assault on the business PC by iOS and Android tablets and smartphones may turn out be a more successful example, but, Apple and Google and Samsung are hardly startups.

It can be done, of course. Many decades ago, Microsoft's PC operating system was such a technology and for a generation, a small company in Redmond changed the world. (With a big initial boost from IBM, of course.)

Current technologies that might have the power to force enterprises to switch and create hugely successful startups include Apache Hadoop, Network Virtualization, Flash Storage, and Cloud Storage and Collaboration. That's where I'd look for the next big thing.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

We tend not to think about storage - until we don't have enough. We carelessly store documents, emails, images, video, and massive amounts of all kinds data only to wonder why there never seems to be enough places to put our company's stuff. But as new technologies combine to provide storage over the Internet, easing fears of limited capacity and the promise of virtualized architectures are helping shape the next phase of the Internet.

Storage Isn't Sexy, But...

Virtual storage is neither as flashy nor as sexy as virtualized servers. Historically, enterprises set up a storage device, backed up data and content in regular intervals and forgot about it. But because hard drives offer limited capacity, it has become necessary to manage multiple storage strategies. Additionally, archiving digital content traditionally meant burning to a disc or transferring data to magnetic tape. The archived data and content was not readily accessible.

As cloud computing has emerged as a basic networking practice, more and more content is stored in virtualized, interconnected storage devices. Not only does this make it possible to access massive files online in an instant, it also makes storage more affordable, efficient and easier to manage.

By abstracting how storage functions from a set of individual physical hard drives to logical storage (or partitions) spread across any number of physical drives, storage can be made less expensive and much more flexible. With virtualized storage accessible in a cloud computing environment, companies and even individuals can now add as much storage space as they need, pretty much on demand. 

Hardware vs. Management

For consumers, this means devices like smartphones and tablets do not require massive storage drives. For enterprises, virtualized storage means spending less on hardware and more on efficiently managing data and content. The trend meant companies can protect their remote office data and remove the need for multiple storage networks. Virtualizing storage also helps with disaster recovery by spreading the information to remote locations and providing multiple copies of data. The trend is toward continued efforts to make cloud-based virtual storage even more efficient and less expensive. Some enterprising companies have already managed their cloud architectures with multiple storage technologies so well that they've adapted their own capabilities to deliver Storage as a Service to other companies.

There's still potential for further migration toward virtualized storage. Forecasts for the global cloud virtualization software market (currently estimated at $6.7 billion) between 2011 and 2015 show a year-over-year growth rate of 14.98%. Virtual machine and cloud system software represents the fastest growing segment, with research firm IDC pegging growth at 17.8% in the first half of 2012.

Investments in cloud-based storage also suggest future growth. Venture funding for storage companies totaled $458 million through the first three quarters of 2011, according to analysis from Strategic Advisory Services International. That is 42.4% more than the $321.5 million storage startups received in the same time a year before. Storage mergers and acquisitions are also on the rise with 23 deals adding up to $8.7 billion through the first three quarters of 2011.

Benefits Of Virtualized Storage

Outside of the obvious benefits of being able to access content from multiple locations on multiple devices, virtualized storage also allows for information sharing between large numbers of people. While it's still a relatively new technology trend, storage virtualization isn't hype. "But it's all about the use cases," says John McArthur, president of Walden Technology Partners and a board advisor at Starboard Storage Systems. "The use cases will evolve and mature over time, just as they are with server virtualization."

McArthur points to making storage asset management less of a problem, where the goal is migrating data from one device to another without having to physically link them together. Other benefits include replicating data between locations, making point-in-time copies of data, expanding storage capacity, and shrinking storage costs. Additionally, virtualized storage allows for a "pay as you go" subscription model that can increase storage capacities as needed, without having to grow data center footprints.

"Some companies will embed storage virtualization in an appliance to make their appliance simpler to manage and control," McArthur said. For example, hedge fund Thames River Capital virtualized its storage area network and saw a 40% improvement in the performance of its virtual machines as a result.

Virtualization Meets The Cloud

As the technology improves and devices continue to be connected to each other, cloud computing will increasingly merge with virtualized storage. One consideration is using cloud versus physical storage for high-performance computing at scientific research centers, according to John Bates, co-founder and CTO at TwinStrata.

"Cloud storage can solve some of the problems associated with big data, particularly in the areas of resource planning and infrastructure growth costs," Bates told industry reporters. "Cloud storage offers massive and automatic scalability, without requiring heavy capital expenditures on fixed storage systems that may reach capacity too fast."

The Internet Of Things, And More

Another use case for cloud-based virtualized storage is enabling a wide variety of non-computing devices connected to the network, also known as the "Internet of Things." In its estimates for 2020, IDC believes approximately 30 billion devices will be connected, each requiring cost-effective use of software and storage for the information gathered.

Considering the capabilities being developed for the next phase of the Internet, it's not much of a stretch to think that virtualized storage could be used to recreate virtual versions of specific events at specific points in time. A wide array of networked storage devices would hold the information from computers, sensors, cameras and other information sources to quickly recreate almost any event or scenario.

Perhaps the holographic event simulator (the "holodeck") from Star Trek might someday be a reality.

Holding on to old data slows applications, increases storage costs and backup times, and dramatically increases the danger of attacks. A good data disposal policy can reclaim some of your budget and help you sleep better at night.

For the sake of argument, let's assume your company already has a data retention policy. If it doesn't, stop reading right now and make one. No one wants to be left in the lurch when auditors come calling or a client claims you didn't pay that invoice back in 2011.

But what about the other side? Is there such a thing as too much data?

Absolutely.

Why You Need To Do It

According to the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council, nearly three quarters of all data stored in an organization has no current business use. If that seems like a lot, consider the forms that data might take. The biggest and scariest culprit is email, which often contains sensitive personal and client information, as well as multiple versions of files forwarded as attachments. Email is a horrible storage and versioning system, but it's one of the most popular.

Then there's the problem of department-specific data silos, which often hold redundant records that can be orphaned. Imagine your HR, Marketing and legal departments each keep separate copies of employee records. For compliances's sake (or, more likely, because you never got around to integrating your systems), those records are all stored in separate systems. If HR terminates an employee but the information doesn't sync, you've just created orphans in the other system that may last forever.

On the other hand, maybe you've done it right. Your records share a common repository and each department has properly permissioned views.

You still might be in trouble.

HR might need to retain certain data after a termination, but retaining other sensitive information might actually be illegal. If you're in a highly regulated industry, you're probably aware of these restrictions. If you're not, you may not know about them until there's a lawsuit after a breach.

Don't forget about the storage issue. Slashing your storage by 50% to 75% would save a lot of cash. The CGOC estimates a savings of up to $50 million in some enterprises. In some highly virtualized enterprises, storage costs can account for as much as 40% of the total IT budget. Plus, everything – from record searches to backups – will run faster.

If you're still not sold, Ben Rothke's 2009 article, Why information Must Be Destroyed, remains valid and convincing.

You're on board. Less data equals the less risk carried, faster systems, and more money.

How Do You Get Started?

Create A Policy

This might sound obvious, but the first step toward disposing your data is to create a data disposal policy. It should mirror and integrate with your data retention policy, as well as any other physical destruction (e.g., shredding) policies you follow. You don't want anything falling through the cracks.

Don't try to make decisions on your own. Each department should have input, and the final policy should pass through legal and compliance reviews before landing on the CEO's desk. Everyone needs to be on board.

Assume The Worst

Try to minimize the amount of effort required by employees. For example, autoarchiving emails past an age threshold will point out inappropriate use pretty quickly. One CTO of a mid-sized firm remarked that when his company moved from POP to IMAP and began archiving older emails, his sales department panicked. "They'd been storing customer data in emails and spreadsheets instead of using our CRM system. We were storing sensitive data without gaining any value, and our sales reps weren't doing their jobs." There will always be room for human error, but prevention will ease the cleanup burden after the fact.

Consider The Hardware

Different types of data require different disposal methods. Medical records or confidential design documents may require physical destruction of a disk or a magnetic degaussing. Old tweets and press releases probably need only a simple overwrite. If you're still storing a mix of data on the same physical disks, this might be a good time to change that.

The disposal methods you choose will be based on your industry, so your Legal department is the ultimate authority, but you can start your research with the NIST's Guidelines for Media Sanitization.

Get Service Guarantees

This is a problem even the largest enterprises sometimes face. Much of your data is in the hands of third parties, and more will be shifting that way soon. It may be their cloud, but it's your data.

Send your disposal plan to your service providers and get a guarantee that they'll abide by it. This may add costs to your contract, but failing to do so makes the policy pointless. If your provider already specializes in government or industry compliance, this should be an easy talk to have. If its not, consider shopping around for new services.

Remember: It's A Process

You won't be able to do everything at once. Some parts of the policy may require more review than others. Some systems may require redesign. Get the low-lying fruit first.

If you're starting from scratch, even the first steps are steps in the right direction.

All images except chart courtesy of Shutterstock. Chart courtesy of the Compliance, Governance and Oversight Council.

There’s a lot of talk in Silicon Valley about the decline of consumer Internet companies and the rising interest in companies that sell software to enterprises.

After all, Zynga and Groupon, the darlings of the consumer wave, have tanked. Facebook's stock collapse robbed the company of some of its sparkle. And suddenly all those boring companies that have been toiling away down on the San Francisco Bay peninsula selling boring software to boring enterprises don’t seem quite so boring anymore — especially after we saw Workday, which sells cloud-based human-resources software to the enterprise, pull off a phenomenal IPO, and when we have investment bankers talking about a trillion-dollar wealth transfer that’s about to take place in the enterprise market.

Yes, suddenly the enterprise is cool again. And nobody is loving this more than Aaron Levie, the 27-year-old co-founder and CEO of Box, which sells cloud-based data storage and collaboration software to enterprises. “We’re feeling fortunate,” Levie said when we sat down for a chat at Box’s offices in Los Altos, Calif.

A Smart Bet On The Enterprise

Five years ago, Levie figured out that the enterprise ultimately would be a better market than consumer products. He focused Box entirely on the enterprise. Back in 2007, that might have seemed like a crazy thing to do. Facebook and Twitter were the hot new things. All the so-called smart money in the valley was chasing consumer stuff.

Just two years ago, in 2010, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins was raving about Zynga, citing it's fast growth and profits. This was right after he launched the $250 million sFund to try to create even more Zyngas. A few months later he made a huge late-stage bet in Groupon -- at about twice the price that the stock carries today. 

Meanwhile the guy who created the Flip camera is raising new VC money to make melted cheese sandiwches. Color Labs raised $41 million for God only knows what. We had Airbnb, then a bunch of Airbnb clones, and then another generation of clones that were the Airbnb of cars, scooters, bikes, whatever. We had Sean Parker raising $33 million to make a clone of Chatroulette.

Meanwhile, Levie and everyone else in the enterprise arena were building real businesses and not getting a lot of attention. 

For the past five years, Levie watched the consumer companies boom and bust while Box took a slower, more difficult path, creating a sales force and learning how to sell to big companies.

Now, of course, everyone is hot for enterprise, and look who's sitting pretty.

Box's War Chest

Box has raised $285 million in venture funding, including a huge $125 million round in July that valued the company at $1.2 billion. Levie won’t disclose revenue figures, but allows that Box has 650 employees, roughly double the level from a year ago. He says revenue growth is tracking with head-count growth, meaning sales are up roughly 100% year over year.

Box’s software is used by 14 million people inside 140,000 companies, including 92% of the Fortune 500.

And this is just the beginning. Pretty soon that trillion-dollar transfer in the valley will begin in earnest, draining out of the legacy vendors and into Box and other cloud-based vendors.

“The dam has broken,” says Levie, who often speaks so quickly that it’s impossible to keep up with him. “We’re seeing all this innovation. There’s more opportunity than ever before. We’re going to see, over the next decade, a huge changing of IT architecture.”

A New Cloud Architecture Emerges

Every day, Levie says, he’s on the phone with CIOs who are building what he calls “the new cloud architecture.” Essentially this means replacing a list of on-premises software with cloud-based alternatives that do more and cost less.

A new lineup is emerging that includes software from NetSuite for ERP, Salesforce.com for CRM, Zendesk for help-desk management, Workday for human resources, Domo and GoodData for business intelligence, Okta and Ping Identity for identity management, AirWatch and MobileIron for mobile device management — and Box for cloud-based storage and sharing.

The Next Market Will Be Bigger

Levie agrees with the premise that massive amounts of revenue and market capitalization will swing over to upstarts. But he says this shift is about more than that.

As he sees it, this is not just a matter of moving the same dollars from one bucket into another. Levie believes that the proliferation of low-cost tablets is creating a much bigger addressable market.

The fact that cloud-based programs cost far less than legacy programs means that even tiny companies can afford them, not just the medium- and large-scale enterprises that can pay for top-dollar products made by companies like Oracle and SAP.

“The one thing that people don’t seem to realize yet is that there’s a good chance that the market will be far larger at the end of all this,” Levie says. “It’s going to be massive.”

Forget Those Fickle Consumers

Enterprise customers do tend to choose products with a great deal of caution, but they stick with them for a long time. Consumers go crazy over a new app or game and quickly move on.

The pain is already being felt in the consumer sector. The Wall Street Journal reports that funding for consumer Web companies dropped 42% in the first nine months of this year. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson, whose firm, Union Square Ventures, mostly invests in consumer Internet companies, says things have changed.

“We are still in the early innings of this more challenging environment,” Wilson said.

You might think your existing broadband Internet connection is fast enough. It’s not. When it comes to Internet speeds, more is always better. That’s why we all owe some sincere gratitude to the intrepid men and women who bring truly high-speed Internet into our homes.

This post is a message of sincere appreciation - a love letter if you will - to the cable guy who recently upgraded the Internet connection in my San Francisco home. Whether you know it or not, you’ve made my life better in so many ways.

I’ve had broadband access at my home since DSL came to San Francisco in the 1990s. So I didn’t think getting faster service would make all that much of a difference in my life. Boy was I wrong.

My family and I just upgraded our cable Internet service from about 10 Mbps to 50 Mbps. And then we bought a new Wi-Fi router to extend that service to all our wireless devices. Now, 10Mbps isn’t that slow, and 50Mbps is far from the fastest service around (heck, ReadWriteWeb’s headquarters clocks in at an awesome 100Mbps). But I am still stunned at how much the change is affecting how we all use the Internet. And how much I want to hug the Astound cable guy who brought it to us.

Easy Upgrade

Compared to the early days of broadband, the process was amazingly simple. The Astound technician came out to our 115-year-old Victorian with a new Cisco DPC3010 cable modem (actually showing up in the first half hour of the promised 4-hour window!) The tech replaced our old unit and checked out the cabling in less than an hour. Bam, the speed of our hardwired connections instantly quintupled! No fuss, no muss.

Except that the increase was only visible on wired connection, not the fleet of smartphones, tablets, laptops and other devices where we do most of our work (and play). They got a bump to about 20Mbps. Faster, but suddenly pokey next to the wired connections.

Even though we had a relatively recent Belkin router using the modern 802.11n Wi-Fi specification, it simply couldn’t keep up. The tech - remember how much I love him? - recommended getting a new router that supported the DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) 3.0 standard. And because we have a mix of Apple, Windows and other devices in the house, my spouse decided to choose simplicity over economy and we splurged for an Apple AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi router.

Although its $179 price is almost double that of competing devices with similar specs, it was by far the easiest router to install and configure that I’ve ever used. Everything was up and running within five minutes, with none of the false starts and geeky questions I’ve encountered setting up other wireless systems over the years. I wouldn’t have chosen it, but I can’t say I missed the headaches.

More importantly, though, suddenly every device in the house was testing out at 50Mbps downloads. 

Faster Everything

The conventional wisdom holds that just about any broadband connection is sufficient for browsing the Web, and that faster connections don’t really provide much benefit in this regard.

Thanks to our cable guy, I can confidently state that conventional wisdom is dead wrong.

Web browsing at 50Mbps is noticeably faster and less annoying than browsing at 10Mbps. In most cases, pages begin loading faster and images show up along with the text, not a second or two later. Downloading large files, from software applications to data sets to high-resolution images is now something we do in real time, rather than a process we start and let run in the background. 

If general browsing got a mild boost from the faster speeds, working with Software as a Service (SaaS) applications delivered over the Internet enjoyed a serious kick in the pants. Gmail and Google Docs suddenly seemed almost as fast as email or productivity software running on a local machine.

Better Streaming

Perhaps the biggest, most noticeable improvement came when consuming streaming content. At 50Mbps, YouTube and other online videos leap into action, instantly jumping ahead with plenty of buffer room. Nice to see on the desktop, but positively intoxicating on an iPad or other tablet, which now seems seamlessly connected to the entire Internet. (I murmur soft words of thanks to the cable guy every time I watch anything on a tablet.)

I now find that I want to have the iPad close at hand at all times, because it’s just so darn easy to watch anything online as soon as I can type it in. Just as important, I’m now wondering why I need a tablet with 64GB of storage space when I can grab stuff from the Net just as quickly. (That makes my new Google Nexus 7 tablet seem more inviting.)

Not surprisingly, that holds true when using streaming media services - whether on a computer, iPad or big-screen TV. Services such as Hulu or HBO Go perform almost as well as our satellite TV service - and our Apple TV box delivers a more TV-like experience than ever before. If it weren’t for live sports, I’d already be considering cutting the cord. (I worry that the cable guy wouldn't like that, though.)

Better Backups and Sharing

All of the members of my household rely on Dropbox to sync and share files, and some of us even pay for extra space. And one of us relies on Apple’s iCloud to sync huge chunks of data among many devices. But syncing all that data to new devices used to take hours, and it churned through much of our 100GB per month data cap. No more. At 50Mbps down and 6Mbps up, those syncs and backups happen much faster. Syncing and backing up to the cloud now seems like a much more reasonable option than it used to.

Upload speeds are often the Achilles' heel of cloud services, but 6Mbps is fast enough to help ease the bottleneck. Still, if the cable guy wants me to buy him chocolates, it would be nice to have upload speeds closer to the downloads.

Bigger Data Limits

When you add up all this stuff, it’s pretty clear that my family is likely to churn through a lot more bandwidth every month - and we were already incurring fees by exceeding our old plan’s limit of 100GB per month. The new plan ups our data transfer limit to 300GB per month, but with the extra speed encouraging all these new uses, we’re actually worried we may blow past that figure as well!

We made the switch because we cycle through a lot of data in our house, and it seemed to make sense. But I think we were all surprised at how much a five-times boost in speed changed the quality and quantity of our Internet usage. I’ve become an instant convert to the idea that the future of the Internet requires that everyone get not just broadband, but really fast broadband.

I hear that Verizon FiOS now offers up to 300Mbps. A week ago, I would have said that’s ridiculous. Now I’m wondering if those speeds will ever be available in San Francisco (if not from FiOS, which apparently won't be built out any more than it already has been, then from another provider). Sorry cable guy, I appreciate how much you’ve done for me, but if the phone company guy shows up with six times faster service, I’m going with him.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

With the rise of online gaming and digital downloads, video gamers in the United States and other developed countries might well wonder why the gaming consoles they buy still come with optical disk drives - and why the next generation of machines will also still have them. The answer, according to recent reports, has nothing to do with protecting retailers.

Earlier this week, ReadWriteWeb reported on the rise of digital downloads and the pressure it is putting on videogame retailers. (See "Game Over for GameStop and Video Game Retailers?") And this week, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Sony flirted with shipping a 2013 successor to the Playstation 3 without an optical drive, then decided to keep it. Microsoft will also ship its next-gen console with an optical drive.

Why bother?

Blaming Slow Net Connections

The Journal claimed Sony and Microsoft based their decisions on shoddy Internet service overseas, which might mean that players would have to spend hours or even days trying to download large game files, and might incur bandwidth fees from their Internet Service Providers.

That reasoning makes no mention of the struggles of game retailers like GameStop, but no doubt comes as a relief to them anyway - at least for the time being.

Still, the fact that Sony - which co-created the CD, DVD and Blu-ray formats - even considered dropping the optical drive from its next-gen console clearly shows where the industry is heading. According to the Journal, even GameStop’s CEO admits that a move to digital downloads is “inevitable.”

ReadWriteWeb talked to a producer of a popular first-person shooter, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid antagonizing retailers. “We all want the industry to go that way. It gets games to customers faster, and it gives publishers a lot more room for price flexibility,” the producer said. He also noted that smaller publishers, such as Hothead Games (makers of the Deathspank parody series), were “basically built on Steam and the Apple Store,” and suggested that digital consoles could open doors for even more indie shops. As Hothead expressed the situation on its own forums: Digital platforms allow for a much higher level of creativity due to the lower investment required to bring them to market. 

So, is the issue of lousy Net access in the developing world the real holdup? Or are there other factors in play?

Who Goes First?

According to the anonymous producer, “No one [in the console business] wants to be the first one to cut the cord.” Retail sales still account for the majority of total game sales, and systems are too competitive for one manufacturer to take the plunge alone. There’s also currently no solid model for incorporating storefronts into digital sales beyond game cards, and no secondary market for preowned digital titles.

Are the video retailers worried? GameStop has declined to be interviewed on these topics, so we went back to a local GameStop outlet and asked the clerk we talked to previously.

He wasn’t too concerned, even allowing that he’d heard rumors of “some pretty big things that might be in the works” with a console vendor. He seemed confident that even a disc-less platform release would still give plenty of time for retailers to adapt.

“We get a big pop in sales for consoles and one or two big games in the first month after a new [console] release, but it really takes a year or so for the new system to come into its own,” he said. “That gives us some time to figure out how things are going to work.”

The clerk pointed out that even though the Playstation 3 launched in 2006, the store still sells plenty of used Playstation 2 games.

Microsoft and Sony have declined to comment about the degree to which they plan to push online sales for in-game “extras,” but again, the clerk was optimistic. “As long as people want to play a game before they buy it or pay for things in cash, we’ll be in business.”

Photo by 'blindfutur3'.

Go Daddy wants to be known for more than domain names and racy Superbowl ads. The company has built large businesses around Web hosting and other services for companies of all sizes. But can it really have it both ways?

At a recent meeting in ReadWriteWeb’s San Francisco headquarters, new Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman delighted in reeling off the company’s impressive numbers: almost $1.4 billion in sales, 53 million domains registered, 5 million websites hosted, and so on. Go Daddy is as big as the next eight competitors combined, Adleman said, and gets more than half of all new domain registrations.

But the company, which was bought by private equity firms for $2.25 billion last year has even bigger aspirations. “We don’t want to move away from that,” Adelman said, but “we think we can do more than serve that segment.”

Servers or Celebrities?

“People think we’re a bunch of guys down in Arizona” with domain names and Super Bowls ads, he said, but there are “sections of the site to address the needs of different communities… We have offerings for the tech community, for the developer community.”

Overcoming those perceptions among seasoned techies won’t be easy, though. Questions like “you’re still using Go Daddy?” are often posed to tech start ups. And really, it’s Go Daddy’s own fault.

No matter what its actual technology credentials, the company spent millions of dollars promoting Go Daddy Girls, not cloud infrastructure (4GH Cloud Hosting) or online storage. Even companies that use those services might think twice about explaining why to the CEO. And that’s especially true the larger, and more sophisticated the company.

Adelman acknowledges “some amount of polarization” around the Go Daddy brand, but believes that the company’s scale more than makes up for any negative perceptions. Go Daddy is big enough to enjoy massive economies of scale, and to create a full suite of add-on products for all kinds of customers. Domian names, website hosting and site-building tools, SSL certificates, marketing tools like search engine optimization, search engine marketing, email marketing and social media. “It’s like selling hot dogs at the ballpark,” Adelman said. Sixty six percent of Go Daddy customers have a product in addition to a domain name, he said.

An App Threat?

Why the tech push now? Although Adelman says it kept growing through the recession, the reason for the push could be the gradual move to mobile apps instead of websites, a transition that threatens Go Daddy’s core business. But Adelman says he’s not worried. “The Web will die a slower death than predicted,” he said, adding that given the hype cycle and the rise of HTML5, it might not be long before you start hearing that “the App World is dead.”

If you've wondered why so many companies are eager to control data storage, the answer can be summed up in a simple term: data gravity. Ultimately, where data is determines where the money is. Services and applications are nothing without it.

Data gravity is a term coined in a blog post by Dave McCrory. Basically, McCrory says to consider data as if it were an object:

As Data accumulates (builds mass) there is a greater likelihood that additional Services and Applications will be attracted to this data. This is the same effect Gravity has on objects around a planet. As the mass or density increases, so does the strength of gravitational pull. As things get closer to the mass, they accelerate toward the mass at an increasingly faster velocity.

...Services and applications can have their own gravity, but data is the most massive and dense, therefore it has the most gravity. Data if large enough can be virtually impossible to move.

Later, McCrory's post went on to talk about artificial influences on data gravity, such as costs, data throttling, legislation and more. Basically, factors that influence the movement of data in ways that wouldn't happen "naturally." For instance, Amazon allows free inbound data transfer, but charges for outbound data transfer. Another "artificial" influence is legislation, telling companies where they may or may not store data, or dictating terms of its storage.

Data Gravity in Action

You don't have to look very far to see data gravity in action. Consider Dropbox, Amazon S3, iTunes or just about any CMS migration ever.

Lots of companies want to emulate Dropbox, but few have managed to attract the same kind of user base as Dropbox. None are as ubiquitous as Dropbox. And that presence is paying off for Dropbox, which has now attracted quite a few third-party apps to its orbit, like Wappwolf and Ifttt. Perhaps that's why Apple is trying to disrupt Dropbox's gravitational pull and rejecting some iOS apps that use Dropbox.

You'll note that Amazon S3 and other Amazon AWS services make it very easy to get data in, but getting data out gets spendy. No shocker here - Amazon wants to encourage as many developers and companies to toss data into AWS, and then tie them to the service.

Apple's iTunes is all about keeping data in Apple's services. Aside from Apple's now-defunct DRM on music, there's no using iTunes to transfer music or movies to other devices. It's Apple devices or nothing. Getting the entire library out of iTunes is non-trivial for many users, so in many cases it's like a digital roach motel: data checks in, but it doesn't check out.

If you've ever worked with content management systems, you already know all about the concept data gravity - even if you've never heard the term. Getting all the data out of one CMS to another is, well, painful at best. Often impossible. This is one reason why companies often stick with aging CMSes rather than go through the pain of migration. 

Consider Gravity Before Deploying

Whether it's a single-user application like iTunes, or a company wide project: You need to consider the implications of data gravity - once your data is in, how hard will it be to break the gravitational field?

The stronger the data gravity involved, the more cautious you should be when you choose your data storage solution. It's likely that once you have a sufficient amount of data wrapped up in a solution, it's going to be very difficult (if not impossible) to justify the costs of moving it away.

(Lead image courtesy of Flickr User Juan Ramon Rodriguez Sosa under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) license.)

Cassandra 1.1 hits just a bit more than six months after Apache released Cassandra 1.0, in October 2011. The major features in 1.1 point to Cassandra's focus on very large data sets.

Notable Features

Jonathan Ellis, vice president of the project and CTO of DataStax, pointed to several features that make 1.1 more than just a minor update. One of the most interesting is Cassandra's support for intelligently mixing magnetic and SSD media.

Ellis says that a Cassandra deployment may have some tables that are updated more frequently than others, so it makes sense to put some tables on magnetic media (which is much slower) and other tables on SSD. Prior to the 1.1 release, Cassandra had no way of distinguishing between the two. This meant that if you mixed media, you could have very uneven results. The alternative, going all SSD or all spinning disks, was either very expensive (SSD) or much slower (magnetic media).

Cassandra deployments can hit hundreds of terabytes of data. The largest (known) production cluster, according to Apache, exceeds 300TB of data spread out across 400 machines. Investing in 300TB of SSD can be very pricey and doesn't make much sense if only some of the data needs to be on SSD.

Another biggie in this release, says Ellis, is support for better self-tuning for performance. With this release, Cassandra self-tuning support has been extended to its caching layer.

Speak My Language

The Cassandra Query Language (CQL) has also been updated. Ellis says that one of the major improvements to CQL is the addition of composite primary keys, a feature that lets developers define more than one primary key per table. Ellis says that this helps to create better views of data and appeals mostly to organizations that are already using Cassandra.

As CQL matures, it has adopted quite a bit from SQL. However, Ellis says that CQL won't be a clone of SQL in the long run, as some features in SQL simply don't make sense for a distributed database like Cassandra. The most obvious feature, says Ellis, is joins. "We don't do joins. It's a bad idea across multiple machines in a cluster. Some people think that the takeaway is that you do joins in the application instead of the database, which is the wrong idea. Whether you do it in the app or the database, it's not a good idea in a distributed world."

"In other words," says Ellis, "we're not looking to make Cassandra an OLTP [online transaction processing] hybrid. We're keeping focused on parts that support a real-time workload. For analytics, we point to Hadoop and Hive support."

I'll Take the High Road, MongoDB Can Take the Low Road

How's Cassandra doing in the bid for mindshare versus MongoDB? If you check out GitHub or Stack Exchange, which often provide an indication of which technologies are the most popular, you'll see that MongoDB seems to have more developer interest. For example, if you look for repositories that turn up when searching for "Cassandra" on GitHub, you'll find 535. Searching for MongoDB shows nearly 2,500. Not the most scientific survey, but there's very little data so far on NoSQL deployments - and being open source, it's impossible to gauge accurately.

Ellis says that this makes sense, as Cassandra is geared much more toward the high end, while MongoDB is well-suited for "grassroots developers."

"They're [MongoDB] going after millions of deployments; Cassandra is going after thousands of deployments. We're going after a market where your data doesn't fit on one machine... our users are Adobe, Netflix, HBO and Twitter. Companies with lots of data."

Open Wins

What's really interesting about Cassandra, MongoDB and other so-called NoSQL databases is how open source projects have effectively sewn up the space. All of the relevant projects are open source, though they may have proprietary variants shipped by vendors that support them.

For many years, open source was seen as a trailing effort to proprietary projects. In the big data/NoSQL space, this has been turned on its head. Cassandra is a really good example of how openness is leading the development of next-generation infrastructure technology.

On a technical level, Box.net’s announcement today of “Instant Mode” may seem more incremental than revolutionary. Part of the rollout of the cloud storage service’s new, more RESTful API for developers, it plays directly into last month’s launch of the OneCloud platform: It’s a new way for other apps - including Google Docs - to connect more directly and even more securely with users’ Box storage.

But Instant Mode takes on more meaning in the context of yesterday's announcement of GDrive. Usually, “drives” are not the tools of specific applications, and since Google Docs syncs with files on your computer anyway, what extra benefit do users get from having cloud-based storage that’s essentially bound to Google Docs? By comparison, Instant Mode operates more like a service... more like a hard drive.

“There’s so many third-party apps that need file and content storage, and simple collaboration. And most of them don’t want to have to work with [Amazon] S3 to do it,” says Box.net VP Christopher Yeh, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb. “It’s too low-level, and there’s too much code to write to make S3 work well for it. If they could work with someone like Box, it’s way easier for them than to write all that code for S3.”

Freedom of Access, Security of Files

Up until now, Yeh explains, whenever a third-party app needed to access a user’s Box.net storage, it had to trip the user’s account authentication. If the user didn’t have a Box.net account, naturally, that process would help her create one; but if she already did, she’d have to log in again. You might not think this to be a terrible bother, but imagine if your word processor had to “log on” to your hard drive.

Box’s Instant Mode solution sounds a little scary at first but makes sense when you drill down. The idea is this: Using the new API and protocols, a third-party app may be given the email address of the Box account holder. With just that email address, the app can request access to the user’s storage area without tripping the authentication process. So the user does not have to log on to Box to give the app access to the area.

That’s the scary part, but once the app has access, it cannot see anything except a single folder that’s specific to the app itself. The app must go through the motions of creating the secure folder, and that trips a new, once-only process of user approval. All other files and folders inside that storage space are invisible to the app.

The folder’s purpose is obvious to the user: It’s created by the app and named after it. (When you install an application in Windows, it often creates a folder for itself under the hidden AppData directory, so this is roughly analogous.) But its contents are encrypted, and only Box can decrypt it. So the app must use the new Box API to access the file contents of the protected folder, which Box itself calls a sandbox.

“We put a sandbox into the account in the form of a folder,” says Yeh. “That sandbox contains the files that are needed by the application, and we give the opportunity to accept or reject that folder [see above]. If they reject, then they won’t be able to use the app with files. But if they accept, then they’re enabled.” Conceivably, an app could be programmed to adopt the old ask-each-time model if the user rejects the folder creation, Yeh told us.

The benefit, Yeh explains, becomes self-explanatory: Under the old system, when a third-party app was given access to the account, it could theoretically see everything in the user’s storage. Talk about scary. Now, it only sees what’s in the sandbox. 

What’s more, only the app and the account holder can see what’s in the sandbox, because it’s Box.net that’s doing the decryption and encryption. Users of third-party apps will still be able to make use of Box storage, even if they haven’t actually established a Box account for themselves yet.

File Storage That Literally Waits for You

One of the first services to make use of the new API and Instant Mode, as Yeh demonstrates, will be LinkedIn. Already, LinkedIn uses Box to enable members to store resumes and career-related materials, and to make those materials available to selected other members.

“In today’s world, if you were to go to your LinkedIn profile and install Box now, what would happen is, it would ask you for a Box login and password, and if you do not have one, then we would ask you to go create a Box account and use that to tie to your LinkedIn account,” says Yeh. “Remarkably, there are still thousands of users of this app on LinkedIn, but the extra step to do that is a big deal and holds us back from being more tightly integrated. Here, what happens is, you’ll be in LinkedIn one day, and you’ll say, ‘Hey, I’d love to load my resume so everyone can see.’ And you’ll go to this spot on LinkedIn... and it will tell you at that point, ‘As part of this, we’re provisioning an account for you in Box.’ And you can say yes or no. If you say yes, at that point, we will create this account for you in Instant Mode, if you don’t have it. And then we will load a folder into your pending mode for you to look at, if you ever open the account yourself. If not, the Box account will be provisioned there, and you’ll never have to worry about it.”

What Box.net is creating, by leaps and bounds, is the foundation for a true cross-platform apps environment where both storage and functionality are accessible everyplace. Remember that the first operating systems were built around accessibility to storage, which in many respects renders Box.net a cloud-based operating system. And if it continues in this direction, equalizing the functionality of Web apps across devices, then the Box.net way of working could become competitive to the Windows 8, OS X and even the iOS and Android ways of working. Customers may begin to ask, what are the virtues of installing operating systems locally? And if the answers continue to get more trivial and esoteric, Box will have gone further than one-upping Google Drive. It will have disrupted the foundation of personal computing.

Libin posted a candid frequently asked questions on Evernote's blog about the funding. In it he admits that Evernote did not need to raise any money and that it has hardly touched the money it had already raised ($43.5 million to date with a $20 million round last fall). Libin makes the bold proclamation that Evernote wants to be a 100-year company. Will the Internet be around in 100 years?

The only real technology company that has been around for 100 years is IBM. That is, if you do not count car manufacturers like Ford or utilities companies like General Electric. In its modern format, the Internet has been around for about 20 years and widely used for about 15. Evernote has been around since 2006 and has only gained popularity (now with 11 million users) in the last year or so.

So, what makes this company think that it can last for 100 years?

In his blog post, Libin quotes Sean Parker (as played by Justin Timberlake) in The Social Network: ""A million dollars isn't cool, you know what's cool? A billion dollars."

"Well, we don't think a billion dollars is all that cool either. You know what's really cool? Making a hundred year company," Libin wrote. "That's a pretty big deal; not many companies make it anywhere close, but we sort of signed up for the task when we started talking about earning your lifetime trust. You plan on living a long time, right?"

A Lot of Things Can Happen in 100 Years

There are so many things that could happen in 100 years. Global warming could melt the planet. Nuclear war could ... well, also melt the planet. Skynet could take over and let the machines rule the world. Do the machines have need of Evernote?

A hot new startup could make online note-taking easier, more powerful and more intuitive than Evernote or a new technology could make the need for digital archives obsolete.

In its short history, Evernote has shown that it can innovate and adapt rapidly to an ever-changing landscape. It recognized mobile as a big opportunity early and now has applications for almost every major platform. It recognized cloud storage and computing early and the necessity of making its service available anywhere and everywhere through the cloud as an essential practice with parallel thinking to what Google wants to do with its applications.

Unlike a lot of startups these days, Evernote uses its own servers to host and make transactions along its database. That means the company is not beholden to Amazon Web Services or Rackspace or any other data center. That is important, as building its own infrastructure will be key to sustaining longevity. The fact that the company now has a fat war chest and a profitable business model will keep Evernote around in the near-term future, even if the economy reaches Depression-era levels.

Evernote Just Might Have The Chops

Evernote has hired Ken Gullicksen (an Evernote board member and formerly of Capitola Ventures, BilltoMobile and Voltage Security, among others according to his LinkedIn profile) to lead its corporate development and acquisition strategy. Here is what Gullicksen had to say about Evernote in a press release.

"It's rare to see a company develop so many high quality products, rapidly grow its user base into the millions and become profitable in such a short period of time. This is a testament to Evernote's leadership and team," said Gullicksen. "With the right strategic decisions, Evernote is in a position to go from popular app to fundamental technology. I'm thrilled to come onboard and be a part of the company's next phase."

So far, Evernote has shown that it is managed well by forward thinking leaders with a cadre of talented developers churning out new features to the platform all the time. The company is already profitable and the new round of funding will be used to compensate long-term investors and employees and then for innovation and acquisition. So far, so good.

But a lot of things can happen in 100 years. Evernote is 1/20th of the way there. Can it continue to grow and innovate uninhibited for another 95 years?

Why Pogoplug?

There are no storage limits or long upload times, explains the company, differentiating its offering from similar cloud services, like Google Music or Amazon's Cloud Player. Both of those services require you to move your MP3s from your computer's drive to the companies' servers and they're only for music.

With Pogoplug, your computer is the server and more file types are supported.

Pogoplug Now Offering Freemium Software - And Free Invites for You!

There are two levels of service with the new software. For free, you can download the client and stream your media to any other device, including iOS devices (iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch), on your same local network. To make your files available online, however, there's a $29 fee. This allows you to install the software on all your machines, too, which means you can make every single file you own available "in the cloud," whether they're stored on a Windows PC or on your Mac.

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The Web interface offers three new apps for accessing your files: an online jukebox for streaming music, a cinema app for videos or movies and a gallery app for viewing photos, already organized using their own metadata.

While the idea of "cloud drive" isn't all that unique, the company is offering a unique spin on the concept - a cloud drive you own and control, instead of one run by a major corporation like Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Apple.

Of course, another big company had the same idea not too long ago - Opera Software, makers of the Web browser of the same name. With Opera Unite, the organization proclaimed it would "reinvent the Web" by turning any computer into both a client and server. The concept itself, as a standalone entity, didn't take off with users, and the technology is now baked into the Web browser instead. Opera may have just been a bit ahead of the time with the cloud streaming concept, or it could be that people don't want the hassle of managing their own cloud. (Did I leave my computer on? Is my home Wi-Fi down?) Still, for only $29, users with larger collections of media might find the small hassle worth price, as it's far cheaper than using a third-party cloud storage service.

While both Amazon and Google's offerings have the same basic concept behind their design, there are some notable differences between the two, as detailed below.

Amazon Cloud Drive: 5 GB for Free, Support for Multiple File Types

"Cloud Drive" is the brand name of Amazon's cloud-based streaming music service. Although the focus, at present, is on providing an online home to your MP3 collection, the service already supports other types of files, too, including documents, pictures and videos. In this way, it's more akin to Google's Docs service, because, as with Docs, you can upload almost any of the most commonly-used file types to Amazon's cloud.

The caveat with Amazon's service is the price. You get 5 GB of online storage for free, which equates to around 2,000 songs, assuming you are just using the service for music and nothing else. Anything more, and you have to pay. There are storage plans available with yearly fees attached. These include the following annual plans: 20 GB ($20), 50 GB ($50), 100 GB ($100), 200 GB ($200), 500 GB ($500) and 1,000 GB ($1,000).

However, not only do your Amazon.com MP3 purchases not count towards your storage total, the company is also running a special through the end of the year which allows you to upgrade to the 20 GB plan just for buying one album from Amazon. There's a caveat here as well, that "free" upgrade is only good for one year from the date of the purchase. Afterwards, if you don't sign up to pay for the $20/year 20 GB plan, you'll be automatically downgraded to the free 5 GB plan.

For playing music from your online storage, Amazon's Cloud Drive includes a music streaming service called Amazon Cloud Player. This online app provides basic music controls, playlist support and filters for sorting by Albums, Artists, Genres and Songs. It supports the playback of MP3 files, like those which Amazon itself sells, plus AAC files, like the non-DRM files sold on iTunes. It also supports playlist import from Windows Media Player and iTunes.

The player works on both the Mac and PC platforms, plus Android phones. A somewhat kludgy workaround is available now for iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), but it's not as polished as the native Android application. It's also not considered an "official" means of streaming your music by Amazon. The company clearly states on its website that "iPad and iPhone are not currently supported platforms for either the Amazon MP3 Store or Amazon Cloud Player." This is mentioned in a side note at the bottom of a chart featuring the Cloud Player's current status for the Web, Android, BlackBerry and Palm mobile operating systems. The fact that iOS didn't even make the chart further hints at Amazon's planned Android-based tablet, reportedly in the works now. By refusing to support iPhone and iPad, Amazon's tablet has a competitive advantage over Apple devices, and Amazon's MP3 store will have a similar advantage over iTunes. (Well, at least until Apple launches "cloud iTunes," that is).

Google Music: Storage for 20,000 Songs for Free, No Music Store

Like Amazon's Cloud Drive offering, Google's Music service is also being launched without the record labels' support. Google's failure to negotiate a proper deal with the labels led to the delay in the launch of Google Music, according to reports.  However, in Google's case, this is a far worse problem than for Amazon because at least Amazon already had a (legal and licensed) online MP3 store where it sells music. Google does not. For end users, that's certainly a shame, but for Google's own purposes, it may not matter as much. Unlike Amazon, Google's main goal isn't to sell more MP3's to end users, it wants to sell Android-based phones. More philosophically, and core to everything Google does, its goal is also to get more people online, using the Web and Google services, all so they can see and click on more ads.

To make up for its missing "store" component, Google is enticing users with features instead. The new service offers things like automatic playlist creation tools and, perhaps more importantly, more free storage. During its initial phase, Google offers beta customers the ability to store up to 20,000 songs for no charge. Google is measuring storage prices in "songs," not GB, for what it's worth. Regardless, Google is offering roughly 10 times the amount of storage as Amazon does, and for free. That's a compelling advantage, and one Google can easily afford. Unfortunately, this "free" option is only available "for a limited time," says Google.

Like Amazon's Cloud Drive, Google Music will involve a lengthy upload process where you use a downloadable client software application installed on your Mac or PC to copy songs from your computer to the cloud. Also like Amazon, a Flash-based Web player will allow you to play your music from your computer, including Google's own Chrome OS operating system. And finally, while Amazon offers a native Cloud Player app for Android, Google will instead update its own Music application for Android, a core app that ships on all Android phones, with support for Google Music. We had previously seen this application in the wild, thanks to users on a popular mobile forum site, XDA-Developers, who discovered a way to install the newer version of the Music app on their phones. They discovered songs could both be streamed and synced to Google's Cloud right from the mobile device itself. Amazon, however, only allows uploads (syncing) from a PC. But both Google and Amazon will support the ability to download songs to your mobile device for offline listening, it appears.

A notable difference between Amazon's Cloud Drive and Google Music is the scope of its offering. While Cloud Drive supports other file types beyond just songs, Google Music, as the name suggests, is for music only. For online storage of other files, Google offers Google Docs, also available as a native Android application.

For now, Google Music will be invite-only - Google I/O attendees will receive invites, as will users of Motorola's Xoom Android-based tablet computer on Verizon, according to TechCrunch.

Geographic Restrictions

Both Amazon's and Google's products are limited to select geographic regions, it should be noted. Currently, Amazon offers Cloud Drive to the U.S., plus Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the U.K.

At launch, Google Music will be U.S.-only.

Note: This article will be updated after Google's official announcement today. Current sources are AllThingsD andTechCrunch, both of which confirmed these facts with Google.

Image credit: lead - LifeofAndroid; player screenshots, forum user RazorHail