Cloud Storage

The amount of data stored on the Internet today has reached astronomical numbers. From Bytes to Petabytes to Exabytes – online data storage continues to rocket. What’s really in a byte? It’s hard to imagine what a terabyte of storage really equates to. If you took the average number of bytes per Flickr photo and converted it to a metric of area, how much space would all the photos on Flickr fill?  We’ve done some simple math and added in some fun analogies to illustrate how much data we’re really talking about.

For businesses that are ready to ditch the hassles of maintaining a file server in-house, we offer Rackspace Cloud Drive. It’s basically a centralized, online hard drive, where your employees can back up, store, and share files securely via their desktop, web browser, or smart phone.

These days, it seems to be all about the cloud.  In the last couple of years, this new variant of hosting has built into quite a storm (pardon the pun) amongst the IT community.  On whiteboards all across the world, amorphous blobs that used to represent what lay outside the application infrastructure ( the Internet, for example) have now been elevated to part of the design.   While the change may seem subtle in regards to brainstorming and spit-balling your way through a design session, the options that cloud hosting brings to developers is quite significant.  The challenge, however, is making sense of all the options and how to leverage the different variants this new trend provides.