In a recent post, A Terabyte in the home? Hitachi’s CTO, the redoubtable Hu Yoshida writes
I don’t believe there will be a market for home storage units. I believe internet service providers will provide the storage and data management for our personal data. They will provide it as a service which we will be able to access whenever and where ever we want. Instead of trusting my data to a low cost home storage unit, I believe an ISP will be able to store it more reliably and cost effectively on a large enterprise class storage system which they can leverage across many thousands of users.
This world view is so at odds with the reality I see that it is hard to know where to start. But I’ll try.
Home storage already has a long history
People have always stored images, and later, text, in their homes. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the wood block prints of Hokusai, people have always enjoyed having images of personal meaning in their homes. Television brought moving images to the home for the first time and later VHS and now DVD allow people to create libraries of moving images.
With the rise of literacy the home library became possible. Among those who could afford it the library became not only a storage area but a shelter from the cares of the world. The 21st century analogue is the home theater.
With the rise of Blu-Ray, it won’t be hard for an average family to acquire 2-3 TB of favorite programming. Especially families with children. People have always collected content and I don’t think that fundamental urge is going to abate any time soon. Today’s content just happens to be in a digital format.
Bandwidth and storage aren’t as fungible as Hu assumes
Home bandwidth is too low to support the kind of easy access to large files the home user wants: home video, graphics, games, movies. More importantly, many people, perhaps most, are visual thinkers. They need to see things to recall them. Thus collecting content in the home serves two purposes: high bandwidth and stimulating memory.
Now the album art images that iTunes displays are a pretty good substitute, especially if you are old enough to remember the LP version. Yet storing even the images locally has many advantages over placing them on the network.
No one is storing such content on a “large enterprise class storage system”
I guess Hu isn’t a regular StorageMojo reader or he’d know this already. Storage clusters and low(er) cost modular systems own the ISP storage business. No way are Tagmas or Symms ever going to compete for this business.
With all due respect, Hu needs a reality check on this part of the vision. I know some of the folks at EMC are ahead of him, and by extension Hitachi, on this point.
The StorageMojo take
I agree with Hu that all other things being equal, people would rather not have a storage array in their house. The point is they never will. Consumer-grade storage systems that work a lot better than today’s storage arrays will arrive, such as Drobo.
Those 1 TB disks will also be popular, combined with off-site backup for the truly paranoid, as people embrace the concept of Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. People like having stuff around where they can see and touch it. Home data storage is no different.
Comments welcome, as always. I discovered that I’ve been taking a break from blogging lately without planning to. I’ve discovered some new topics, so stay tuned.
I’m glad you picked up on this Robin. I think the world is inherently Peer-2-Peer and people prefer to keep their data close because of bandwidth and latency. I can appreciate why HDS likes to centralize the storage for the home through several ISP’s and sell them lots of Tagma Store Arrays, but as you pointed out, the world is not going in this direction, in fact the opposite.
I would ask Hu if he has tried downloading a file using CIFS or NFS over the WAN! It’s not the bandwidth, but the latency that kills these protocols. We will soon have 10Gb/s local ethernet in the home/office, and there’s no way this can compete with my SLOW DSL line.
backups over the WAN for disaster recovery maybe, but full fledged storage of my home content, not likely.
best
./c
Glad to see you back in the saddle. You might be interested in my own perspective on this topic here:
http://thestorageanarchist.typepad.com/weblog/2007/06/0012_a_terabyte.html
People prefer to keep their data private, as well as close. My digitized family photos and home videos aren’t gonna be trusted to live at some ISPs disk farm. I’ll take on the requirements to organize, manage and backup my stuff locally to ensure that I (and family members) are the only ones pawing through my stuff — not some ISP employee. Better safe than sorry.
well, in japan you can easily get 100mbit in your home. which is kind of nice for doing ofsite backup, which will get more popular with services like strongspace http://www.joyent.com/connector/Secure-Backups/ which will be encrypted on disk pretty soon thx too zfs crypto.
but that is not a solution for my home storage i need fast, big and reliable network storage 1tb is bare minimum and it should be mirrored. for me this means i build my own nas based on Solaris Express (opensolaris). for most people that is not an option, maybe some one picks solaris up and makes a small nas distro for home and smb out of it. that would rock big time.
and much as it hurt me to say, but windows home server is the right step. a simple network disk is just not enough.
a combined solution with a home server and secure online storage for backup and roaming is the way to go. sure backup only for the important data.
another solution would be to distribute the backups to the home network. many people have more then one computer in there houses, and many dont even come near using all the space at all machines. a software that backups to a crypto file on the machines would be kind of nice.
Hmmm – perhaps Hu lives at work and hence doesn’t have to worry about Internet service interruptions (DSL might be more robust in this respect than our cable is, but we don’t live close enough to an office).
I’d certainly be interested in replicating my home data at least partially to some service provider as long as I could encrypt it, not only for safety but so that I could access it easily from anywhere I wanted to. But pass up the option to have the high bandwidth, low latency, and guaranteed access of home storage? I don’t think so: home storage is just too easy and inexpensive (and the continuing emergence of Drobo-like products will only improve that situation).
Ya know, I don’t think this is as far fetched as it sounds. Obviously all the components are not in place yet, but In Major metropolitan area’s we’re already seeing fiber rollouts to the home (Palo Alto, CA for example). Its by no means commonplace, but its not unheard of. If Major City X were to roll out (usable) fiber to the home, it would improve the odds of me living there. What is stopping it from being more commonplace? Is it just cost, or are there more sinister road blocks?
I admit to not knowing enough about japans infrastructure, but I too have heard these rumors of massive connectivity to the apartments of japan. This doesn’t seem too difficult for our major American metropolitan areas to do either.
If I had the choice, all things being equal, I’d prefer to keep my data somewhere else, just like I don’t keep my money stuffed in my mattress, or buried in my backyard.
The biggest problem for me is the nickel and dime effect. I’m nickel and dimed to death right now with monthly fee’s, and bonus fees (cell phone, internet, cable tv, tivo, satellite radio, text messages, pay per view, surcharge fees, fuel fees, 9/11 security fees, parking garage fees, “convenience” fees, etc etc). I really don’t want any more monthly fee’s, so buying my own in house storage unit, allows me to keep those costs under control. I think THAT would be my biggest hesitation to storing all my content with my ISP. I really just don’t want another $29.95 fee.
There are a few other gotchas in lettng your ISP be your storage stack:
1) What if that ISP goes out of business? In today’s world of here today/gone tomorrow Web2.0 and former dot bombs, that’s a serious concern.
2) What about portability? Suppose I wish to change storage providers. Is my current storage provider going to help me with that? And if they do, how long will it take?
3) As mentioned by others, latency. I just can’t get my data as fast from even the best ISP, as I can from my LAN.
The ‘cloud’ is a long way off for most of us.
Being in the home automation business myself, we don’t really see this happening either. Taking the legality out of it, our clients easily get to 1 – 2 TB of information with ripping CDs, lossless music, ripping HDDVD & Bluray movies, let alone high res digital photographs. We recommend only using a online based disk backup in case of fire, etc and some have choosen to do so. They pay a small monthly fee, and upload at off hours, but like accessing everything locally … makes it easier to sync devices, etc. We even had thought of starting our own online, offsite backup service for our clients that way they know there information will remain very private …