• A billion files saved every 24 hours.
• It has 100 million users, twice as many as a year ago.
• Nearly 96 percent of its customers use Dropbox for free.
• About $500 million in revenues.
• Almost 250 employees. It started the year with 90 employees.
• A year ago when its revenues were $250 million, it was valued by private investors at over $4 billion. The company has attracted quite a few celebrity investors. Today its value is rumored to much higher.

That growth has come despite increased competition. In an interview with The New York Times, Houston dismissed competition and said:

“Those companies are busy trying to build something we had four years ago. We’re out front. We’re already out there and building smaller features and things. All those other companies have turf to protect, and they’re fighting a battle on a totally different front.”

Where is this company going? If its deals to bundle storage into Samsung and HTC phones are any indication, Dropbox has plans to embed itself into many devices and eventually become the “filesystem for distributed data” for the new connected world. Houston touched on this briefly at our RoadMap conference in 2011. Watch the video.

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Traditionally, flash has been used as a cache layer either within storage arrays or within servers themselves to speed delivery of hot data. The latter model is how Fusion-io’s flash components are delivered into data centers.

Making the case for primary flash storage

Recently, though, there has been a strong movement toward using flash for storing all an organization’s primary data, not just the hot stuff that needs special attention. This has been spurred by lower prices for flash memory at the component level, as well as by a greater understanding of the energy savings and and price-per-transaction savings that flash can provide. Flash might require a bit more capital investment upfront, but it pays off in the long run.

eBay is a prime example of the benefits of flash. Nimbus Data CEO Thomas Isakovich told me that eBay had only 2.5TB of flash installed six months ago before recently upgrading to 100TB. Within the PayPal division, where Nimbus is deployed, Isakovich said eBay has cut power costs by 78 percent, cut its rack space by half and is able to better meet performance demand overall by spinning up virtual machines even faster.

Virtualization, actually, is another driving force behind the uptick in flash interest lately. Its benefits around consolidation and flexibility also bring performance overhead for storage operations.

As for the Nimbus gear, it comes in 2TB, 5TB and 10TB chunks and is scalable up to 250TB. It uses ELC NAND, which the company claims is 10 times more durable than standard MLC NAND, and runs a specially designed file system and software set. Among the features are advanced compression, deduplication, replication and thin-provisioning capabilities.

Isakovich claims that when one factors in lower file-system performance overhead and the fact that Nimbus doesn’t charge a licensing fee for its software, his company’s systems can actually come in at a lower price per gigabyte than spinning disks. His math must not be too far off: Nimbus has more than 200 customers just over a year into selling its product, and reached profitability on the back of angel funding alone.

Spreading the wealth

Nimbus Data is just part of a greater market, though, which is why the notion of mass flash adoption seems more realistic than ever before. Nimble Storage and Tintri are also serving small enterprises with a hybrid flash-and-disk approach; Violin Memory is serving the highest-performance customers; and even SolidFire is serving cloud providers as its target market. And they’ve all been raising lots of money and building their customer bases.

Add in the recent surge of flash support by mega storage vendors such as EMC and NetApp, and customers soon won’t be able to escape the flash onslaught.

Isakovich thinks Nimbus Data can become a $10 billion company — “the next NetApp” — by capturing the hype around flash and maintaining its competitive pricing model versus hard disk drives. That’s a long way off, and Nimbus has plenty of competition, but someone has to make that money.

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Online Backup

Online backup refers to copies of files that are directly accessible. Some examples of online backup would be copying files to USB thumbsticks or an external hard drive, and cloning a drive with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. Online backup is convenient because you don’t need any additional software to get access to the backup files and you save the time that would be spent on restoring files from some other type of backup archive. Cloning is particularly good for system drives because you can boot up your computer and get to work right away instead of waiting to reinstall everything or restore files from a backup archive like you would with Time Machine.

Examples:

• USB thumbdrive
• External hard drive
• SuperDuper! clone

Nearline Backup

Nearline backups are usually saved in an archive format that is saved to storage that is directly attached to the computer, or available on the same local area network. Nearline backups use additional software to manage the copies and provide some additional benefits like compression, incremental updates, versioning of files, and maybe even centralized administration and security. The disadvantage of nearline backups is that you can’t boot from them if your startup disk is down and you can’t directly access the files if you take the backup drive to another machine. Time Machine is the most familiar example for Mac users, but other software like Retrospect can be used this way too.

Examples:

• Time Machine
• Retrospect
• Tape drives

Offsite Backup

Offsite backups are simply copies that are stored in another physical location from the computer. The purpose of offsite backup is to protect you in the case of fire, theft, or some other disastrous event like a lightning strike or flood that would destroy both the computer and the backup storage next to it. Offsite backups, by nature of being physically removed, take time to recover and restore and are really only there for catastrophes. You can rotate physical drives offsite, use cloud backup service like CrashPlan or a filesync service like Dropbox.

Examples:

• Second Time Machine drive
• Cloned drive
• CrashPlan
• Dropbox

These different layers can be combined to provide you with the right amount of protection for your needs. Here are three ways that a casual, moderate and hardcore user might implement online, nearline and offsite backup for their important files.

Casual

Online

• Copy your most critical files to a USB thumb drive. Repeat this process every quarter.

Nearline

• Buy an external hard drive and turn on Time Machine.

Offsite

• Take a second USB thumb drive with critical files to work.
• Get a free Gmail  account and email an encrypted disk image (use Disk Utility) of your files to yourself (don’t forget the password!).
• Get a free Dropbox account and copy up to 2 GB of files.

Moderate

Online

• Clone your system drive to an external hard drive with SuperDuper! Update your clone at the beginning of every month.

Nearline

• Use Time Capsule for automatic network backup. If you have a laptop, don’t underestimate the convenience of having Time Machine just run while your computer is on without having to remember to plug anything in.

Offsite

• Buy more storage from Dropbox or…
• Sign up for CrashPlan, possibly the best cloud backup service for Mac users

Hardcore

Online

• Clone your system drive to two different external hard drives with SuperDuper! Take one clone off site and rotate them every week.

Nearline

• Time Machine with Time Capsule.

Offsite

• CrashPlan
• Dropbox in addition to Crashplan
• Second cloned drive
• If you’re really, really hardcore, set up a second Time Machine drive and rotate that offsite as well. You will have to manually switch drives in Time Machine preferences each time you rotate the drives.

Whatever your level of preparedness (or paranoia), there’s a backup strategy for you. Take a little time this Worldwide Backup Day to choose one and implement it before you have a reason to regret putting it off any longer.

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The service migration is going to start Aug. 17. If you want to switch to the new storage provider, you don’t need to do anything: the switch will happen automagically. “We’re not scuttling these services – we’ve taken control and rebuilt them into a second version,” said Jeff Mancuso, CEO of Expandrive, a company that sells  ExpanDrive software -  an SFTP client for Mac and Windows and lets you mount the remote server as a network drive. “We’re turning this into an iDisk killer – it’s extremely fast and reliable. It feels like a USB key,”

If you don’t want to sign up with ExpanDrive, you have until Sept. 30 to download the data. Since I don’t know Expandrive very well, I am going to have to find an alternative. I have been using BingoDisk for so long that I have accumulated tens of gigabytes of data as backup. Downloading it and then re-backing it again doesn’t look like a fun exercise. Thank god for a big, fat broadband pipe — it might actually get done. The question is, where to keep it all? For syncing between computers I use Dropbox, but it doesn’t have a backup-only option. So maybe Jungle Disk?

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Building on the success of their initial offering, ExpanDrive has released version 2.0 of their Mac client for accessing a wide array of online storage systems.

ExpanDrive is built on MacFUSE, an open-source project that provides the base functionality and SDK for connecting to remote and alternative filesystems. The ExpanDrive developer-alchemists have mixed in a bit of their own Python and Objective-C components to significantly enhance the potency of these MacFUSE-managed filesystems and definitely improved the formula for this major update. Read on to see what’s new in 2.0.

SFTP Overhaul

Not fully satisfied with the status quo, the developers brought the SFTP engine back to the lab and have completely re-engineered it. My tests confirmed that large file copies now transfer in approximately half the time. Traipsing through my cluttered web directories in the Finder is also a less painful experience due to a fully re-worked caching system.

An even more pleasant surprise is how quickly remote edits are detected. The video below shows a text file being edited in both vi on my very remote Linux box and also open locally in TextWrangler. Edits made on the server side show up almost instantaneously now.

FTP/FTPS Support

ExpanDrive has had experimental support for FTP/FTPS filesystems for quite a while and has now made it a first class filesystem in version 2.0. As a daily user of the product, I regularly peruse both their Twitter activity and Get Satisfaction support forums and can attest that they really do listen to users. It’s very obvious that they wanted to make sure that FTP/FTPS support worked under as many conditions as possible before bringing it to their entire user base. If you must use FTP, you should definitely take advantage of the enhanced security in the FTPS protocol if at all possible. Standard FTP transmits both your credentials and all data completely in the clear, making it very easy for malicious users to eavesdrop on your sessions.

GUI Enhancements

Continuing the theme of listening to their users, ExpanDrive has tweaked their GUI to provide more information about the types of drives available and provides the ability to eject volumes from their Drive Manager as well as open volumes in the Finder.

You can now also change the drive icon and use your own icons for ExpanDrive volumes by clicking on the drive icon in the edit dialog:

Live! New! Filesystem! (S3 Support)

Perhaps the most significant enhancement is the inclusion of support for Amazon S3. While inherently not as robust as SFTP volumes, S3-mounted volumes let you use the Finder to manage your buckets (i.e. copy/move/delete files), including setting object permissions via contextual menu. I created a test bucket via S3Fox, used ExpanDrive to move files into it and verified the results back in S3Fox.

Should You Buy/Upgrade?

If you’ve never used ExpanDrive and regularly have to FTP/SFTP files or work with content in S3 buckets, then you really should consider giving ExpanDrive a try (list price is $39.95 for new users). Existing users should also consider upgrading just for the speed and integrity enhancements alone. Couple that with good S3 support and it’s well worth the $19.95 upgrade price (free if you’ve purchased the previous version within 60 days of release).

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Aaron Levie, CEO and founder of Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup Box.net, agrees. He has decided to pivot his company away from the consumer and instead focus on business users. “We are going to be less about storing music and photos and more about focusing on storage for collaboration,” he said in an interview. As we had pointed out earlier, an ad-supported online storage model isn’t for the faint of the heart. Several, including AOL’s XDrive and Yahoo’s Briefcase, have shutdown.

Using storage as a hub for collaboration is something Levie and I had discussed in August 2008. We were both in agreement that swapping emails with big attachments wasn’t quite efficient. Still, it would be hard to beat email’s ease of use unless online collaboration was dead simple. Since then, Levie’s team has been quietly building on that idea and has come up with an easy way to collaborate.

The new Box.net is optimized for the business users and easy collaboration between work groups. In the new layout, instead of folders and files, you see people sharing those same files. You can easily see the latest activity on the folder, showing which files were most recently edited, commented or discussed.

The new user interface looks like a cross between Facebook’s News Feed and 37Signals’ Backpack. Box.net had previously made its storage service compatible with various other web services, such as Zoho and Scribd. This makes viewing and editing documents quite easy.

Box.net says it has about 50,000 business users, but will those be enough to keep the company from being crushed by big gorillas (currently) in the mist? Microsoft, EMC, and Cisco Systems are all going after the storage-collaboration market. A few days ago, rumors surfaced about Google’s GDrive, another competitor to tiny Box.net. (Related post: Why Google needs the GDrive to fight Microsoft.)

With such big opponents, things look tough for the tiny Box.net. There’s one thing its competitors haven’t got, though — Levie. By the time they wield their clumsy clubs, he’ll probably have figured out a way to outrun them.

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At present you pay 15 cents per GB/month of storage used, regardless of the amount of storage consumed. The current cuts don’t impact the pricing for data transfers and requests made to the Amazon S3 system. Nevertheless, this is still going to save some dollars for startups that are using the S3 service. Amazon, in making the announcement, gave some interesting data points:

* Currently there are over 29 billion objects stored in Amazon S3 vs. 22 billion at the end of Q2 2008. That is sequential growth of 32 percent.
*On Oct. 1, the service peaked at over 70,000 requests per second to store, retrieve, or delete an object.
* Over 400,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Service.

What I was most amazed by was the sheer variety of companies that are using the S3 offering. For instance:

* National Geographic’s topo.com uses S3 to sell maps, download updated trail and trip information and even create trip maps to share with their friends.
* Sonian uses it for large-scale content archiving for things like email compliance.
*Indycar.com and indy500.com utilize Amazon Web Services for web hosting, live video streaming, and live timing and scoring applications.

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This security is under your control – you can also take portions of your backed-up data and make them shareable. So, for example, you could have a folder of photos on your computer that was backed up on a continuous basis, and any time you add a new photo, it’s instantly shared with all of your friends and family (or at least the ones you’ve opened the share to). Your first 2GB of SpiderOak storage is free; after that, you can buy storage in 100GB increments for $10 per month. You can use the client from as many devices as you like for that price.

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His company runs two online storage services, IDrive and IBackup. While IDrive is a more consumer-focused backup service, while IBackup caters to the enterprise crowd, because of its additional capabilities. Think of them as Mozy and Mozy pro, says Kulkarni, who claims that his self-funded (bootstrapped) outfit is growing almost 50 percent every year.

Revenues for 2008 are projected to be $12 million, up from $8.3 million in 2007 and $5.4 million in 2006. The company has been profitable for three years now, but Kulkarni declined to share profits data. At present, the revenues are split 70/30 in favor of IBackup, but he is betting this is going to change soon. “The conversion rate for free to paid for IDrive is about 15%,” he wrote to me in a subsequent email exchange. “Early 2007, we had to create a version of IBackup to compete in the low priced segment, hence the IDrive product offering.” The company has about 250,000 users and stores many petabytes of data, Kulkarni says.

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VLAB has discounted tickets for NewTeeVee readers available for $30 here. The action starts at 6 p.m. on March 18 at Stanford Business School. Hope to see some of you there.

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