When last year’s hard drive shortage threatened Backblaze’s all-you-can-store cloud backup service, the company had to get creative to keep up its 50TB-a-day hard drive habit. The solution: external hard drives from retail stores and an army of volunteers making sure they kept coming. Read more »
Can a small company compete with Dropbox and Box in the wild-and-wooly world of cloud storage and file sharing? Mathias Ericsson, CEO of CloudMe, thinks so, provided the company is creative and ahead of the curve. Read more »
With more software vendors fielding their own cloud storage capabilities, Box continues to beef up enterprise security and perks for its offering. New features include two-step authentication, company-wide search for admins, and content scanning, the company said. Read more »
The more-wood-behind-fewer-arrows Google has announced its latest round of retired products, among them Insights for Search, which has been merged into Google Trends, and Google News Badges. Additionally, storage accounts will be consolidated across Picasa and Drive, giving users one pool of capacity. Read more »
The tension between scrappy young startups and legacy companies in the enterprise world was on display Tuesday, with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff noting his company’s challenges to some enterprise products from Box.net, Asana, and Read more »
Mark Shuttleworth, a superstar in the open-source world and the force behind Ubuntu Linux, is funding Inktank to the tune of $1 million. DreamHost spun out Inktank last year to help get customers up and running on Ceph open-source storage technology. Read more »
Nasuni, the startup that built its business bringing secure unified cloud storage to mid-sized businesses and companies with remote branch offices, is attacking the BYOD problem with new support for iPhone and Android devices, says CEO Andres Rodriguez. Read more »
Just when we think we’ve maxed out the amount of cloud-based storage the world can consume, there’s data to prove us wrong. IHS iSuppli research shows that cloud storage subscriptions will grow at double-digit rates til 2017 when they’ll hit 1.3 billion Read more »
Basho says its Riak CS object store will fit nicely into the CloudStack open-source cloud platform. As service providers and enterprises look for Amazon S3 compatible storage, entries like Riak CS and DreamHost’s new Ceph-based store could be viable options. Read more »
Since launching five months ago, Mover, a startup based in Edmonton, Alberta, has picked up thousands of users with data migration service, but the company’s ultimate goal is broader. This week, the startup graduated from Vancouvers’ GrowLab accelerator. Read more »
Coraid built its business with fast-and-simple ATA-over-Ethernet storage which doesn’t require expensive infrastructure upgrades. Now it’s diving into software-configurable storage with EtherCloud which incorporates Yunteq cloud orchestration technology the company acquired last year. Read more »
A Y Combinator company called Filepicker.io wants to change the world of accessing cloud-stored content by giving developers the power to connect their apps to everywhere users store content. And because the service deals in URLs rather than files, a slow mobile network won’t kill it. Read more »
Most companies in the market for a new data center deal in total secrecy with agents and data center providers under NDA. Cloud backup player Backblaze is turning that model on its head by publishing the RFP it’s using for its new data center. Read more »
It’s all-flash, all the time for Pure Storage, the Mountain View startup that just netted another $40 million to pursue that goal. The funding will go toward fueling a global push and staffing up sales and engineering teams, the company said. Read more »
No surprise, SkyDrive in its newest incarnation is starting to look an awful lot like Windows 8. Also new, an Android app joins existing Windows Phone and iPhone versions. Microsoft SkyDrive competes with Apple iCloud and Google Drive for consumers’ digital content. Read more »
These suggestions might seem like common sense, but the more we use cloud services, the more we put ourselves at risk of identity theft and other negative effects of cybercrime. Here are six ways to at least make it more difficult to steal your data. Read more »
Dropbox reports that the recent spam attacks that impacted some European customers occurred when hackers used passwords obtained from outside sites to access some Dropbox accounts. The company promised a new two-factor authentication option and offered other tips. Read more »
Could Google be preparing a Drive promotion for Chromebooks and Chromeboxes? Based on a review of Chromium OS code snippets, the answer appears to be yes; there are references to a free 100 GB of Google Drive space, which would make Chrome OS more appealing. Read more »
Box will use the $125 million to expand its international presence beyond a new London office, says CFO Dylan Smith. The Series E cash influx led by General Atlantic Partners, brings total funding for the enterprise cloud storage player to a whopping $287 million. Read more »
While it’s overstating the case to say that Box has renounced its fatwa on Windows Phones, it is worth pointing out that the cloud storage company now supports the current release of Windows Phone and will support the upcoming Windows 8 Phone as well. Read more »
Amazon’s new “High I/O Quadruple Extra Large” compute instances use SSD to store and retrieve lots of data fast — which should make them popular for interactive web and mobile applications where real-time response to user clicks and gestures is key. Read more »
The mystery of the spam afflicting Dropbox users remains unsolved as of late Wednesday. Starting Monday, users of the popular file-sync-and-store service started complaining about spam sent to email addresses associated only with their Dropbox accounts. Read more »
Basho Technologies, the company behind the Riak NoSQL database and the Riak CS cloud storage platform, has raised $11.1 million and has entered into a partnership with data center provider IDC Frontier to distribute its technology throughout Japan. Read more »
Egnyte nets $16 million in Series C funding to position itself as a leading hybrid cloud storage provider. The cash brings its total funding to $32 million. Google Ventures led the round which included funding from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Polaris. Read more »
Chromebook owners have a new software update that adds Google Drive integration and offline Docs support Google previously announced. The newest Chromebook models also gain a firmware update while the original CR-48 models gain the new Chrome OS user interface and open source touchpad drivers. Read more »
Cloud storage specialist Nasuni is embracing unified storage, meaning its service now supports block storage (typically addressed by iSCSI and Fibre Channel devices) as well as the file storage it already supported and which is commonly used in branch and remote offices. Read more »
Cloud storage player Box is launching its mobile app framework OneCloud for Android on Monday, just in time for the Google I/O Conference. Included in the apps selection is Docusign Ink, Breezy, iAnnotate and Fetchnotes, said Chris Yeh, VP of platforms for Box. Read more »
To deal with the BYOD wave, Gartner recommends that companies roll out mobile data protection, mobile device management and fund special mobility strategy teams within IT to handle the issue. IT folks would likely welcome that, but won’t hold their breath. Read more »
Amazon S3 now hosts more than a trillion objects for its cloud computing customers, proving once again that AWS is the king of the cloud. That’s 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in the galaxy. Read more »
CloudLock, the Waltham, Mass.-based startup specializing in cloud security, says it’s bringing PCI compliance to Google Drive storage. The company’s new service scans files flowing into and out of Google Drive looking for personally identifiable information. Read more »
Cloud storage player gets $13.6 million from newbie OpenView Venture Partners and existing investors with the conspicuous exception of Amazon, which ponied up $9M last time out. Sonian will use the money to bring CAD and medical images into its managed/searchable cloud service. Read more »
Cloud storage provider Box adds a more advanced administrative console, enterprise-wide search, enterprise license agreements and support for multiple email domains to its service. Enterprise features like these are a battle ground for cloud service providers trying to convince IT to make the cloud move. Read more »
Cloud storage provider Box experienced a snafu early today, as some users reported via Twitter that they could not access their stored documents. The company acknowledged that some customers experienced difficulty getting to their Box-stored files for about two hours early Tuesday. Read more »
Brad Garlinghouse, who once headed up AOL’s Silicon Valley operations, is now CEO of YouSendIt, a provider of file sharing, sync, storage and collaboration software for businesses. Garlinghouse replaces Ivan Koon who is leaving the company after six years. Read more »
Box, the cloud storage company that would like to be the “Dropbox of the Enterprise” appears headed for an IPO next year.
The company just added Dana Evans, former CFO of Verisign, to its board and named her head of its audit committee. Read more »
Samsung announced on Wednesday that it has acquired mSpot, a cloud-based content company formed in 2004. Until now, mSpot offered music storage with streaming playback and also movie rentals for various mobile platforms. The purchase is likely to bolster Samsung’s Media Hub for content and storage. Read more »
Cloud Engines’ Pogoplug Team software creates “on-site storage clouds” using existing PCs or servers in a way it claims is far cheaper than the various Dropboxes for the enterprise. Authorized remote workers can access folders or files as needed. Read more »
Cloud storage vendor Nirvanix will use $25 million in in Series C funding round led by new investor Khosla Ventures to add to its engineering staff and expand global sales and marketing coverage. Read more »
Google Drive joins a crowded field that’s polarizing between consumer and corporate offerings. Google is big enough to try to service both customer bases, but its lack of focus leaves a lot of room for competitors to ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Symform, a company that brings peer-to-peer technology to bear on the cloud storage problem, netted $11 million in a new Series B investment round led by WestRiver Capital and including OVP and Longworth Venture Partners. Erik Anderson of WestRiver Capital joins the Symform Board of Directors. Read more »
