Dern (among many other roles in the tech space he was the founding editor-in-chief of Internet World) takes a close look at a variety of the current cloud backup offerings, including ElephantDrive. He tracks down quotes from some of the industry’s leading figures (we’re happy to report that our founder is among them).

As our friends at OnlineCloudStorage Blog point out, the two big winners were QNAP and NETGEAR, outpacing the competition at least in part because of their built-in cloud backup services.

If you are a NAS owner, what is the most important cloud storage feature to you…

You can find the blog here: http://readynasvault.wordpress.com/. Aaron has already made some headway and published several informative posts, often linking to great coverage of the space. If a couple paragraphs feels like too much to read, you can also find the twitter feed here: http://twitter.com/#!/readynasvault.

Thanks Aaron. It’s great to have you as part of the team.

Yesterday Red Hat announced the acquisition of Gluster, a Sunnyvale-based provider of open source solutions for storing and managing unstructured data in the enterprise, for $136mn in cash.

The company was founded in 2005 and has over 150 customers. The transaction is expected to close in October. Gluster offers GlusterFS software that enables enterprises to pool commodity storage and compute resources and manage them centrally. GlusterFS allows both capacity and performance to scale on demand, from a few terabytes to multiple petabytes, using both on-premise commodity hardware and public cloud storage blocks. Gluster’s notable customers include Pandora, Box.net, and Samsung.

This looks like it could either 1) be bundled with Red Hat for enterprises so that installations can take advantage of pooled storage, or 2) be a move by Red Hat to get into the cloud storage space (presumably with custom solutions for Red Hat installs). Which do you think it is?

You spoke, we listened. Since inception, our Home Plans have garnered a lot of interest and many of you have written in asking for differently sized plans, better tailored to your actual storage.  Today, we are proud to introduce our brand new lineup of Personal Plans. We now offer a variety of options, ranging from 100GB to as high 2TB (need more?  just write to us).   You can now select the one that best suits your storage needs. We’ve kept our prices highly competitive and still offer the following great features:

• Covers up to 3 devices
• Easy-to-use file sending
• Automatic backups
• Maintain version history for 30 days
• Military grade encryption
• Access files from anywhere

We also continue to offer the 15-day free trial for any new users who signs up for a Personal Plan.

Better yet, the ElephantDrive engineering team is continuing to nerd out.  They are working hard to improve the service and value we bring to our users. Pretty soon, we will be rolling out with an exciting big feature and our first mobile app. Stay tuned!

ElephantDrive Team

We already have a development road map laid out for mobile, but your feedback is important to us. Please let us know what you think by taking the poll below…

1,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That’ show many bytes of data will be created or replicated in 2011. That is 1.8 zettabytes.

The good folks at Storage Newsletter offered their take on the highlights and the study’s sponsor (EMC) has pages dedicated to the Digital Universe program and an abstract of the study itself.

What do you think?

Also, thanks for tweeting our post about Lady Gaga and cloud storage.

Below is what happened and what it means…

Fans ranged from infuriated to “outraged” as they were unable to download or play the music for hours. Check out Mashable’s coverage for more…

Downloads of the album are delayed, leaving folks unable to get the entire album immediately upon purchase. Amazon issued the following statement:

Amazon is experiencing high volume and downloads are delayed. If customers order today, they will get the full Lady Gaga, Born This Way album for $0.99. Thanks for your patience.

However, the damage has already been done, as users are meting out one-star ratings in droves, most of which deal with Amazon’s slow service as opposed to the quality of the music (although some reviews in the lower bracket did dub the disc “disappointing”). As a result, the album has a relatively low three-star rating.

Reviews of the following nature reign: “This review isn’t a review of the album, but of the Amazon’s digital music service. I tried this as an experiment to see if I wanted to order more music this way, but it only downloaded half the songs. Still a deal at 99cents, but not an experiment I’ll want to repeat with a full-price album.”

Since Lady G is a forward thinking gal with a savvy marketing team, it seemed like a special promotion was created in tandem with Amazon, but reports from Gaga’s camp and Universal Music suggest that they had no idea about the promotion. This implies that Amazon acted alone, offering the entire album for only $0.99 if fans purchased from Amazon using their newly launched “Cloud Drive,” effectively subsidizing the costs of the album in order to promote its new online music/media solution (further entrenching themselves in the battle with Apple for music sales).

Demand was apparently so high that it “melted some servers” according to Craig Pape, director of Music for Amazon.

This is very concerning for potential customers of the infrastructure supporting the Cloud Drive. It’s built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the well known on-demand computing and storage platform. With supposedly unlimited computing power behind it, how did the system fail? Does this mean that AWS is not reliable? After all, they did have a major outage just last month…

Fortunately for current and future customers of AWS, it doesn’t seem like the issues have anything to do with the platform. In spite of the troubles in April, the EC2 and S3 offerings remain among (if not atop) the best in the business. It just turns out that while Amazon is great at providing scalable infrastructure on-demand, they are still learning a lot about software development for end users. These issues were almost certainly the result of the Cloud Drive software – not the web services that back it.

This brings us to the lesson – infrastructure matters, but it not enough. You have to have great software in order to provide a cloud storage service at scale. In spite of having limitless processing and storage, you can (you will!) fail if you haven’t designed, tested, and deployed a great system.

In any event, the Amazon music team is still going to try to make this work and will continue the promotion, pledging to get it right this time. We’ll see how it goes the second time around…

Thanks to Lady Gaga – you not only put on a hell of a show, but you’ve taught an important lesson about cloud storage.

We are very happy to announce that all our core/critical systems were back online as of late Friday (4/22) evening and all primary systems were back online back Saturday morning. To reiterate a key point, no data was lost or compromised.

We have done thorough checks and conducted a variety of tests to ensure integrity has not been compromised and that everything is operating smoothly. You will now be able to access and use ElephantDrive normally.

As mentioned in our earlier post, it is now our priority to develop a plan to improve our infrastructure to better handle such situations in the future. We will be posting a full post-analysis during the next few days to provide more details on the situation – as much as possible we will work with the team from Amazon Web Services to provide information as well.

We thank you again for your patience during this outage period.

Team ElephantDrive

We have been working hard with Amazon Web Services team in the past 40 hours to rectify the issues caused by the problems with our EC2 instances. Like many other firms, we were not able provide service for the vast majority of the window.

We are happy to announce that we are now back up and running. We are currently doing integrity checks and will be slowly bringing all systems back online in the next couple of hours. In the meantime, you should be able to operate normally, though we will be conducting a variety of tests on live services and moving nodes in and out of the farm, so intermittent issues may still occur.

After all systems are online and operating normally, it is our top priority to do a thorough analysis of the issues and develop a plan to improve our infrastructure to handle situations like this in the future. Our team at ElephantDrive sincerely thanks you for your patience and apologizes for any inconvenience caused.

Team ElephantDrive