P2P storage: Can it beat the odds and take on the cloud?
December 7, 2012
Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Jack Clark.
All around us the Googles, Facebooks, Microsofts and Amazons are building datacentres so they can store companies’ information, allowing organisations to spend less on their on-premise IT equipment.
According to the digital cognoscenti, this breed of cloud computing is the way of the future. But what if there was another way to create a global cloud, one that didn’t involve cementing the dominance of global technology companies like Microsoft, Google and their ilk? Would you use it?…
Symform thinks you would. The three-year-old company told ZDNet this week that, as of 30 November, it is storing petabytes of information across 175 million files in a global peer-to-peer cloud. This data is not being stored in datacentres – as it is in the Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds – but on the drives of servers, desktops and NAS boxes in 160 countries across the world. The company is far from being the first to try to put the spare compute and storage capacity of people’s machines to work, and judging from those who have gone before it, there’s no easy path ahead…
Read more from the source @ http://www.zdnet.com/p2p-storage-can-it-beat-the-odds-and-take-on-the-cloud-7000008380/