The other side of the firewall

This post has been syndicated from The Server Room, Ars Technica’s new community for IT professionals. This article on cloud storage is part of an ongoing topics and discussions related to IT and storage technology.

This past Monday, managed hosting company RackSpace announced that a subsidiary of theirs, Mosso, is currently beta testing a “cloud storage” service that will compete with Amazon’s S3. Priced identically with S3 ($0.15/GB per month), Mosso’s CloudFS will add another line to the ever-expanding menu of ways that users can keep files on remote, distributed, redundant storage. What the announcement and subsequent press coverage didn’t highlight, however, is how Mosso actually got into the cloud storage game in the first place. For a managed hosting provider that’s already in the business of building, deploying, and managing servers, rolling out a cloud storage solution wasn’t a hardware problem as much as it was a software problem.

[From Introducing GigaOM Briefings]

From Yahoo’s press release…

In order to expand its cloud computing capabilities, the Company will form a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, charged with developing a computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness. It will move all consumer-facing platform teams to the Audience Technology Group, led by Venkat Panchapakesan. In addition, it is putting new leadership in place behind Yahoo!’s search group, naming Prabhakar Raghavan to direct search strategy and Tuoc Luong as the interim leader of the search product team.

another sync-in-the-cloud service.