HP and Yahoo to put an end to online data storage backup services
HP and Yahoo have notified users that they will be shutting down their online data backup services. This past January, AOL closed up its XDrive service.
Paul Shread stated in his report for Internet News that Yahoo’s free Briefcase service was bypassed by users who saw more benefits to the greater storage capacity of its e-mail and Flickr offerings, while the XDrive Web site now sends users to offerings from Box.net and ElephantDrive.
HP’s Upline service got off to a rough start last year when it suffered an outage soon after it launched. HP is no longer backing up customer files, but will temporarily permit customers to access files through the restore feature.
Jeff Boles, a Taneja Group analyst, stated that storage vendors try to tackle hosted storage services but do not put any innovation into their attempts. Also, said Boles, to some consumers, the services are hard to use, try to take on too much, or represent only a partial set of functionality.
Boles said that the most successful consumer services, such as EMC’s Mozy and Box.net, are targeted at narrow use cases like backup or single user archives.
Boles stated that he hopes to see something that has more caching and performance, while also maintaining the lightweight front ends that are expected by Web users.
Greg Schultz, founder and senior analyst at StorageIO, said that there is too much confusion, too many solutions, and not enough revenue or paying consumers in the cloud storage market.
Lauren Whitehouse of Enterprise Strategy Group stated that if a vendor has the business model that permits them to be cost-competitive while still maintaining strong service levels and they continually innovate, then they can make it in the cloud storage market.
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