Hey, start-ups: Why do you only cater to storage SIZE QUEENS?

One of the most impressive demonstrations I saw at SNW Europe was from the guys at Amplidata. On their stand, they had a tiny implementation of Amplistor with the back-end storage being USB memory sticks. This enabled a quick and effective demonstration of their erasure encoding protect and the different protection levels on …

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they are start-ups.

Start-ups need fast cash to "start", hence the word "Start-up". If for your first company you set out to sell to individuals similar to WalMart or Apple, prepare for disappointment.

What is sad is when a start-up does so well, it becomes a sell-out. Thus start-ups become viewed as wash-ups.

[ArmanX]

Re: Because they are start-ups.

I'd agree with that; the business I work for sells to both consumers and businesses, and the money to be made from a single business outweighs that of a consumer by at least two orders of magnitude. Even though the margin is (or at least, can be) higher for consumer-grade stuff, if you sell N at a margin of 10% to consumers, it makes less money than if you sell 100 * N at 5%.

[Jim O'Reilly]

Personal Object Stores

Intrinsically, Object stores should be simpler than any other form of storage. In some sense, we already have them, with services accessible form your handheld to cloud storage systems.

I think the concept needs to be exploited more. The vehicles for communicating are still a bit clumsy and "file-ish", and while that works for nerds, the simple object paradigm fits the connected consumer better.

For SMB, the need is a bit different. Objects work here too, but a portal with perhaps a local copy of data will work better than relying on Internet delivery delays being small. The Object store becomes a well encrypted backup to the local data.

Long term, block IO will fade away. Being able to treat objects with extended attributes will obsolete the file method, which is to me a simple form of Object store anyway.

[P. Lee]

Already there?

I moved my root OS and data partitions from disk A to disk B the other day using LVM, while it was online and being used.

Very cool and surprisingly easy (pvmove).

I think disk management is already there, so there's probably less money in it, especially from consumers with little economic driver. It could use a nice gui though. All the great features aren't immediately obvious.

Hello Suse? Yast update?

Object storage is just a db. I doubt you'll see it on low power nas because the CPU to support it isn't there. In the end, you still have to find that bit of disk with the data, which means block-io.