Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick, Slow (without the Quick)
.jpg?t=20110701013326 "Snails")
In his recent article on Microsoft's Skydrive, Steve Cassidy illuminates an often forgotten (or, more likely, ignored) aspect of storage in a public cloud: speed. In a blog post from early 2010, some stark figures were calculated illustrating just how long it can take to not only collect your files, but send them to the public cloud in the first place, and it is interesting to note that after way more than a year the problem is still as present as ever.
Steve's post looked at a 25 gig payload (since this is the Microsoft offering) where as the post mentioned above looked at 50 gig, so I would suggest both in the same ballpark citing very reasonable storage requirements. In that example the blog calculated that approximately 220 hours would be needed to send the data to the cloud in the first place - that is over a month! This is in accordance with Steve's assertion that
In reality, given likely upload speeds, we are looking at a couple of weeks to use this method of upload - and that's for any type of file, not just pictures.Remember that Steve's example uses half the storage requirements, and he calculates that two weeks would be needed to send the files to the public cloud, tying in nicely with the "4 weeks for 50 gig of data) calculation. Thus a two and a half day requirement to download the files again seems perfectly reasonable - or unreasonable when you consider that this is solid download time to recover your files, that you have typically spent a lot of money asking someone else to store. And let us not forget that during that one month of upload time you will be pretty much unable to use your internet for anything else since upload bandwidth can often destroy download bandwidth: the cost goes way beyond the physical price you would pay for the service.
None of this is the fault of the provider, per se. These companies are offering a very valid service: it is just that the service, by necessity, relies on an infrastructure not designed to cope with it. It all boils down to an old adage that I see surface time and again: Use the right tool for the job.
Image credit: Simon Howden
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