Cloud Storage Comparison: Benchmarking From Afar

First time accepted submitter fasuin writes "Which is the most advanced cloud storage solution? Which is the impact of server locations? What are the benefits of advanced techniques to optimise data transfers? Researchers from Italy and The Netherlands have come out with a set of benchmarks that allowed them to compare Dropbox, CloudDrive, SkyDrive and Google Drive. Which is the best? You can check it by yourself by running the tests on your own if you like." What this kind of benchmarking can't well do, though, is predict which of these cloud storage companies are going to be around in five years, which might be at least as an important a factor.

Re:pretty sure

[gweihir]

Apple, Google, and in particular, MS, could just decide that they do not care about that product anymore...

Re:pretty sure

[fermion]

In fact when Apple moved to iCloud, it did not transfer data from Mobileme though there appeared to be no technical reason not to, and this was for paying customers. There was plenty of warning, but if data was not backed up it was gone.

Then there were all the accounts Google was deleting a couple years ago. They have never been of the tact that customer support, even for customers, is important. Getting back data is no their concern.

MS has not been in the free online data store biz for long. Yes they have some commercial offering, but they are only just entering the consumer space depends on the success of the new new Surface. Otherwise it will just be an MS Office feature. MS had no problem ending play for sure and all the customer data associated with it, which represented real money, not just easily backed up data.

Ice Pick in the Eye

[Anonymous Coward]

I really want to stab any moron who uses the term "Cloud" in the eye with an icepick. .

Re:

[tqk]

Except for the "any moron" there, that would include Vint Cerf (he's drawn quite a few clouds), so you didn't add anything. Cheers.

Wrong benchmark

[0123456]

How about measuring how fast the NSA get a copy of all my stuff?

Re:

[gagol]

Using dropbox or any cloud data storage provider to store sensible information is not a good idea.

Re:

[bobstreo]

Using dropbox or any cloud data storage provider to store sensible information is not a good idea.

Do you mean sensitive?

Because I think it's sensible to not use sensitive information, and it may not be legal in some cases.

Most of what I have in dropbox is recipes and gutenburg ebooks.

Re:

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

Using dropbox or any cloud data storage provider to store sensible information is not a good idea.

Most people put total nonsense in their cloud storage, so that's fine... (hint: foreign speaker alert! "Sensible" does not mean the same thing it means in French (at least, perhaps some other language in question. for Spanish speakers, try translating "No me molestes!" for fun...)

Re:

[pegasustonans]

How about measuring how fast the NSA get a copy of all my stuff?

That depends on how fast your upload speed is.

Re:

[module0000]

EncFS fits really nicely on dropbox. It avoids the whole every-change-causes-full-resync problem of using TrueCrypt.

Of course, that may just alert the NSA to your presence faster when you have a big glob of data they can't get at. Somewhere, someone picks up a $5 wrench and starts driving in your direction...

Cloud...

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck it. I've been reading Slashdot almost since it started. I'm fed up with this now. Bye.

Re:Cloud...

[clj]

Yay! No more lame Anonymous Coward posts!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh!

Hey! Why did I just woosh myself?
Weiiiird day I tell you.

What is my problem? I wish I would shut up about this already.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Woosh!

Hey! Why did I just woosh myself?
Weiiiird day I tell you.

What is my problem? I wish I would shut up about this already.

Okay, now it's weird. Stop hacking my account, this isn't funny anymore!!

Re:

[gelfling]

Not with an 8 digit user number you haven't.

GlusterFS could be on this list

[purpleidea]

It's pretty awesome, and pretty cheap on $/Gb/Performance.
I'm biased because I'm the Puppet-Gluster dev.
http://ttboj.wordpress.com/puppet-gluster/ [wordpress.com]

You can run GlusterFS in "cloud" or on your own iron. Because it's not proprietary, the possibilities are endless, and it has a lot of very elegant features.

HTH
Cheers

Re:

[purpleidea]

You can run it in the cloud too. You'll have the same/similar latency problems as with "native" could storage. If your storage is distributed across different AZ's, latency will be worse. Depends on your provider too. Jeff Darcy gave a talk about this at LISA:
https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa13/storage-performance-testing-cloud [usenix.org]

GlusterFS has proper, geo-replication which is becoming much better and HA in 3.5 (coming soon).

Cheers!

wat

[wizden]

can't well do?

Security is NOT an issue with The Cloud.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.

The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.

And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.

My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.

Amazon S3

[tkuCheck]

I use Amazon Simple Storage Service [amazon.com] and I really like it. The only wish I have for it is that it would be cheaper. As far as quality of the service itself, I think it's as good as it gets nowadays, but don't take my word for it.

Re:

[Bodero]

Well, essentially that's the backend for Dropbox - they are a service built on top of S3.

However, if you don't need your files often, but rather just want a place to archive them, you can take a look at Amazon Glacier [amazon.com] - an archiving and backup solution. You can even implement lifecycle policies inside your S3 buckets to automatically move files older than X days from S3 to Glacier, which is much cheaper.

Re:

[flyingfsck]

Thanks for that link!

So bascially they're all terrible

[gelfling]

We knew that already of course most of it depends on your connection which can be truly awful as well.

Publish Something

[Fnord666]

I guess someone was told that they had to publish something this year or lose their faculty position, so this is it.

Maybe I should try again

[Bengie]

I tried Dropbox a few months back. It was quite slow because of the way they transferred the data in a blocking way. When trying to upload a 2GB file to their service, I would see my network activity jump to about 30mb/s in 1/2 a second, then drop down to 0, then 1/2sec later, start transferring the next block. My connection was effective used only 1/2 the time. Even worse, TCP didn't have enough time to ramp up, so it couldn't make full use of my connection.