Uncloud

We (= team from DistriNet) are participating in an online competition, named Battle of Talents. In short: engineers form virtual ventures and MBA students can invest in these virtual ventures. The most successful venture wins. Our venture is called Uncloud and solves this problem in a more generic way. Our product is a software service that provides a secure backup of data that is stored in cloud applications and enables easy conversion between competing cloud applications. It is positioned as a 'data insurance'. Check out the website@http://www.uncloud.eu and enjoy our promotional video's!

I don't believe in the cloud

I do not believe in the cloud. At least not as an outsourced solution for all my data/applications. The reason is simple: cost.

Suppose I have 2TB of data. How much does it cost to store this in the cloud? I did some simple calculations for different providers and this is the result:



The 'NAS' option is when you buy yourself a NAS device (actually 2 NAS devices since you need a backup) and add electricity costs.

With the exception of Flickr for storing your photos, the NAS option is by far the cheapest option. I used two years as a timeframe since that is a realistic timeframe to buy a new NAS device (actually most people keep NAS devices longer so the NAS option becomes even cheaper).

Other advantages of using NAS devices for storing your data:

• privacy friendly/piracy safe
• content is close to where it is consumed most frequently (at home)

When you look at different types of content from a cost perspective, you can distinguish the following categories:

• music/video's: not cost-effective to store at a cloud provider. You also need a lot of bandwidth.
• photo's: cost-effective since there exists fixed-fee services like Flickr.
• all other types of content: you can find free (or very cheap) services. For example for mail, tasks, contacts, documents, notes, ...

Regarding the pricing of cloud storage, I am wondering which of the two following options is true:

• Flickr is too cheap for storing unlimited number of photo's/HD home video's.
• General purpose storage services like Amazon S3 make huge profits.

Torrenting in the cloud

I want to have my torrents as fast as possible. Since my main computing device is a laptop, I'm not online all of the time: I commute to work, I sometimes sleep (when my children aren't sick), ... So I want an always-on device to take care of my torrenting needs. Luckily, I have a server/router device that is responsible for my Internet access. I installed transmission on this server (actually 2 servers, it's a failover setup. Yes, I'm a geek). In addition, I installed this Google Chrome extension that allows me to manage my torrent application running on my server from within my laptop browser, wherever I go! Whenever I click on a torrent link, it is automatically added to the application on my server and starts downloading. My browser gets notifications about finished downloads, I can see the list of downloads, pause downloads, set speed limits, ... all from within my browser! What is left is a mechanism to import finished download in a (non-existent?) web application that manages my videos and music ...

Here's a screenshot of the torrent extension in Chrome: