Shebanator

James Duncan Davidson has written a great article about the Economics of Online Photo Backup at the O’Reilly blog Inside Lightroom. Very interesting to me to see how the world of professional photographers is changing, and to see how expensive it can be to backup a large photo library.

Of course, using an online system as your backup is one thing, and using it as your primary is another. The recent tales of woe at Joyent over Strongspace and Bingodisk had me wincing in pain, both for their customers and for Joyent as they tried to deal with the outage. As someone who develops hosted services that include a very large storage component, reading this stuff and the comments that ensued had me waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. What’s most interesting about the story, though, and the thing that ties it back to the backup story mentioned above, is how much economics was a driver for how the Joyent systems were architected and how those economics reflected back in the outage.

~ by Andrew Shebanow on 29Jan08.

Posted in Rich Internet Applications
Tags: economics, scaling, storage