ReadWriteCloud

The ownCloud project is adding features fast and furiously. The open-source file synchronization and sharing project announced the Milestone 4 release earlier this week, taking ownCloud in an interesting direction for corporate users. Forget Dropbox killer - ownCloud could be something even better, someday.

If your boss asked you to identify all of the various SaaS-based providers that are being used across your corporate network, how long would it take you to put together a report? This isn't academic: As more of your end-users sign up for these cloud-based services, it becomes increasingly harder to maintain the appropriate enterprise security policies as the number and kinds of files stored there increases.

If your business is producing Web sites, then it's all too easy to assume that the way you innovate is by producing bigger, broader, more content.  When you consider the platform as something that exists only on the client side - where the customer determines the scheme and not you - any functionality you create becomes a slave to the browser, the runtime and the operating system. And your business model maintains its 1995 profile. Standards attempt to ameliorate this dilemma, but as the HTML5 process demonstrates, such attempts may last decades.

If you're an applications developer, then your business is to deliver service. In that case, you have a life-altering choice to make: Do you deliver all your functionality to your client and count on it to be executed there in its entirety, or do you let some or all of it be executed on a server in what your customers are calling the "cloud"?

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.

Amazon's primary claim to fame is online retail - beginning with books, remember? - and the company has been very effective at growing that side of its business. So effective, in fact, that it's easy to mistake the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-based computing platform as little more than a way for Amazon to make use of excess computing capacity. That underestimates the resources that Amazon is putting into AWS, and the affect the company is having on the future of computing.

It could be the killer combination of server technologies: unified object storage with sharded, distributed big data. Imagine Hadoop clusters whose locales transcend both geographies and clouds, and whose contents can be addressed the same way as any other file. It could help bridge the current gap between big data clusters and regulated, relational databases. 

Red Hat is planning such a move, as part of its ongoing beta of what’s now called Red Hat Storage 2.0 (RHS 2). The company’s Tom Trainer, a veteran of the storage industry, spoke with ReadWriteWeb about this latest unreported revolution.

The French-based company Cedexis has come up with a Cloud Performance Index. It's an interesting way to measure the performance of your content delivery network or cloud-based provider, and a useful way to determine which provider you should use - or even which part of the planet you should locate your apps. Every day on its website, Cedexis will publish new country-by-country performance reports on various IT providers. The info is collected via a Javascript tag on its customers' sites. The tag is counted only if the entire page has loaded.

GoGrid today introduces its Big Data Solution predictive analytics platform. It adds features that combine the best from cloud computing with hybrid cloud flexibility and front-end apps. Everything is managed from the GoGrid web-based management portal. Amazon and others need more assembly of individual pieces that are less integrated than what GoGrid offers.

It's been a few years since we checked back on CloudFlare's distributed DNS and content delivery services. Last week, the company announced a new feature called ScrapeShield, which adds five new types of content protection to the company's panoply of services.

Google announced today that it's dropping its pricing on Google Cloud Storage and its integration with several enterprise storage offerings. Google's updated pricing scheme puts it roughly in line with Amazon's S3, but what else does Google have to offer except a new pricing scheme?

I spoke to Google's product manager for Cloud Storage, Navneet Joneja on Monday about the pricing change and how Google stands out in storage.