ReadWriteWeb

2011 will be the year the floppy disc goes extinct. Sony, which sold 47 million of the 3.5-inch discs a year at its height, is phasing them out in Japan, one of the last markets. According to the Examiner, sales fell to only 8.5 million in 2009.

Sony's sales of floppies worldwide ended in March of this year. Sales in Japan will end next year exactly a year later. Most worldwide manufacturers of floppies already put the kibosh on the little devils.

EMC is a large company focused on high performance storage for enterprises. It's offerings are closely aligned with the idea of extending infrastructure from virtualization to private cloud infrastructure. The company wants to help IT data provisioning services are as easy as Amazon and as secure as Fort Knox.

To get a handle of where enterprise data storage meets the web, we looked for inspiration from architects of the web and Internet, including web pioneer Sir Tim Berner-Lee and Vint Cerf. We take a look at EMC as positioned as the closet, physically, to the core assets of the enterprise.

The move to virturalization leaves no stone left unturned. It touched the public network via EC2 (and now a host of hosts) it formed the Cloud and fused a new generation of the Internet. Service orientated also hits the data centers and this means things like switches, servers, and disk.

At the core of the movement of virtualization movement is freedom of the physical environment. Optimize hardware performance and set the workload free. In the process of doing this, a promise of cost savings has set a off a storm in re-factoring the data center.

This is the first in a series of posts taking a look at areas of the data center and how an openness strategy become a driver for winning customers by bringing costs down.

One lesson the devastating earthquake in Haiti has taught us is that natural disasters can cause billions of dollars in damage anywhere in the world almost instantaneously. If an earthquake of that magnitude were to hit a tech-centric city like San Francisco, millions of computer files would likely be lost in the destruction.

Natural disasters, house fires and hard drive failures are exactly the futile situations for which backup services like Carbonite exist. Carbonite has been providing consumer level backup since its foudning 2006, and now the company is offering competitively priced solutions for small businesses.

Google just announced dramatically reduced prices for their online storage options via a post on the company's Official Google Blog. The new rates give you 20 GB for $5 per year, or, as Google puts it "twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price." The new options also let you expand your storage all the way up to 16 TB if need be. As always, these extra storage options are available once you reach the limit of your free storage.

However, the system still only works with Gmail and the photo-sharing service Picasa. There's no mention of it expanding to encompass other Google services like Google Docs, for example. And there's definitely no mention of the seemingly mythical GDrive, the long-rumored online storage system supposedly under development which would allow for the upload of any file type for safe storage in the cloud. We're beginning to wonder: will Google ever offer us a real cloud storage solution?

The spiraling costs of supporting unstructured data such as active file archives, home directories, data migrations, media storage, and data warehouse extensions is a headache for most medium-sized Enterprises. Zetta, a startup out of Sunnyvale, CA is offering to relieve the mid-size customer of the burden of supporting their growing storage needs.

Zotero, the popular open-source research and bibliography tool, just announced the latest version of its Firefox plugin (1.5b1), which now allows users to synchronize their databases between different machines, as well as a number of smaller updates that will make it even easier to create and curate bibliographies with Zotero.

Zotero also announced a new online component to its plugin, which, in conjunction with the new synchronization features, automatically creates an online backup of your database on Zotero.org.

Besides email and photo sharing, storing documents in the cloud and syncing them between different computers is quickly becoming one of the most common uses of cloud computing. Syncplicity is one of the numerous entrants in this market, and while it is quite similar to many of its competitors, we have come to like it a lot thanks to its intuitive web interface and ease of use.

One feature still missing from Syncplicity, which came out of beta late last year, was a Mac client. We were able to get some invites to the private Mac beta of Syncplicity, however. You can claim yours at the bottom of this post.

For years people have speculated that Google would use some of its incredible capacity to offer dedicated online data storage, something like a "Google Drive." Hints that such a project is in the works have popped up time and again, but some interesting new ones have emerged lately.

Why would you like a Google Drive service? For the presumably very low price point (free?), for the ease of backing up important data or for the potential integration of stored data into other powerful Google services? There's lots of reasons to perk up your ears when rumors like this pop up.

Today, Wuala, one of our Top 10 International Products of 2008, released a major update of its platform. Until today, you had to use Wuala's desktop application to use the service and access your files. Now, however, you can also use a web interface to access Wuala. Wuala also implemented an API that will allow developers to to hook into Wuala's storage services.

As we pointed out in our initial review of the service, Wuala uses the computers of other users to store a large part of the data on the service. Users who share a larger part of their hard drives are rewarded with more cloud storage.