So I come back from a day off and what do I find? IBM and Google, Sun and Amazon reportedly pairing up in the cloud.

I have to say that cloud computing has made the growing IBM/EMC rivalry that much more interesting. EMC threw one of the first punches with the rollout of Fortress and acquisition of Pi–it seems EMC will probably stick to building its own infrastructure rather than partnering. But then IBM went for a partnership with one of the other most recognizable brand names in the world (aside from its own) in Google, which consumers are already comfortable using in the real world. Meanwhile, PiWorx remains in stealth. It will be interesting to see where the next leapfrog move comes from.

Incidentally, how long before Sun acquires Zmanda? They’ve already acquired MySQL, for which Zmanda offers open-source backup and now they’re buddying up with Amazon, for which Zmanda offers an interface (Amazon still requires you to roll your own GUI or get one from a partner). It could link Sun’s open storage products–via open source software!–to the cloud with Amazon. It would be just one big happy open-source conflagration…I’m still watching for it.

Meanwhile, the other tizzy lighting up my Google Reader is over the lack of a deal between Microsoft and Yahoo. Rob Enderle has an interesting post up on Google’s role in that situation. I’m wondering, as IT and cloud vendors keep pairing up, if we shouldn’t be looking for familiar faces among those next in line to be Yahoo’s dance partner.

Hardly a day goes by without a new storage service rolling out. On Monday, it was IBM’s turn to launch two storage services as part of its portfolio of services for midsized customers - organizations with 100 to 400 employees and a handful of Windows servers.

The interesting thing about IBM’s Remote Data Protection Express and E-Mail Management Express offerings is they are the first new services IBM has launched from its Arsenal Digital Solutions acquisition in December. The Arsenal brand is gone but the remote data protection service is the same one that Arsenal offered, even still including data deduplication from EMC’s Avamar.

The email archiving service is something Arsenal was working on at the time of the acquisition, pushed to market quicker with IBM technology.

“Email management is a new offering [for Arsenal],” said Arsenal alum Brian Reagan, now an IBM Information Protection Services executive. “Under the covers we’ve started to adopt and integrate more IBM offerings.”

The email service covers Exchange and Lotus Notes, and Reagan said database and unstructured data archiving services are in the works.

Since Arsenal was into managed storage services long before anybody talked of clouds and SaaS (software as a service), I asked Reagan if he thought IBM should have kept the Arsenal brand. He said Arsenal did have a name for itself and partnerships with AT&T and other large providers, but IBM is a pretty recognizable name too.

“We get the benefit of IBM’s brand,” he said. “As Arsenal, we would have to spend twice as much money to get the attention of customers because they didn’t know who we were.” Reagan pointed out that IBM ran advertisements for its services during the PGA Masters broadcast. “That was something Arsenal could only dream of,” Reagan added.

Then again, you don’t have to be IBM to attract attention for storage services these days. Everybody’s getting into the cloud act, and Reagan says the glut of offerings have served mostly to confuse customers.

“There’s a tremendous amount of customer interest,” he said. “The downside is, it’s created confusion. Some of the really low end players that only service the consumer end of the market have clouded the picture. They’ve confused people wondering what the difference is between low end service that’s priced too good to be true and real resilient service.”

In other words, it will take awhile before enough sun shines on cloud computing so we can really know what to expect.

I was very happy to see one of my regular blog-stops, Anil Gupta’s Network Storage, pick up on a recent post I wrote–the one about HP’s new online storage services.

In his response post, Gupta picks up on this graf in particular:

Like most online storage offerings to date, this offering is small in scale and limited in its features when compared with on-premise products. Most analysts and vendors say online storage will be limited by bandwidth constraints and security concerns to the low end of the market, with most services on the market looking a lot like HP Upline.

And responds:

there is nothing unique in most Online Backup Services that couldn’t be in traditional backup for laptop/desktop. At least traditional backup also come with peace of mind that all backups are stored on company’s own infrastructure. In last few years, I tried over a dozen online backup services in addition to putting up with traditional backup clients for laptop/desktop and I don’t see much difference among the two.

IMO, most online backup services are just taking existing on-premise backup strategy for laptops/desktops and repackaging it to run backups to somebody else’s infrastructure instead of your own.

I see what he’s saying, but in my opinion Gupta probably has “too much” experience with backup clients to necessarily see things from the SMB customer’s point of view. For him, installing a backup client isn’t a big deal–for some, it might be enough of a reason to let somebody else deal with it. Or at least, backup SaaS vendors are hoping so.

I feel the need to make a confession here. Up until yesterday, despite spending a generous portion of my waking hours covering data backup, disaster recovery and data protection, I myself did not have a backup plan.

I do digital photography in my spare time, and creative writing outside work, and I’ve been a digital music addict since the advent of Napster. So I have about 100 GB on two IDE drives inside a Windows XP machine custom-built for me by a highly geeky friend. And it’s just been sitting there, waiting to be snatched away into the ether.

Then another friend of mine told me about how his MacBook hard drive crashed. On his birthday. While he also had the flu.

He told me how his entire visual design portfolio, an important part of his resume for the business he’s in, has been lost, along with all of his digital photographs, many of which he didn’t have posted on Flickr or stored anywhere else.

He went on to tell me that his costs for trying to recover the data from the drive are going to run him upwards of $2,000–if he’s lucky. It could be cheaper, but that would mean less of his data has been recovered, and so now he finds himself in the position of hoping he’ll have to spend more money.

It’s a bittersweet subject for him that so many people he knows, myself included, have credited his experience with finally getting them off their butts and backing up. But that’s the reality.

I ended up going with the 500 GB Western Digital MyBook, because that’s what my friend also ordered once he learned his lesson the hard way, and he’s far more technical than me, so I trust his judgment. The MyBook came with Memeo’s AutoBackup and AutoSync software, of which I’m only using the former. It also came with a bunch of Google software including Google Desktop, which I found rather odd.

Having covered data storage for the enterprise, I’ve had a chuckle whenever I’ve checked on the initial backup job’s progress. Granted, it’s got a QoS feature that cedes system resources to the PC, but let’s just say I’m not seeing the kind of data transfer rates with this thing I’m used to hearing about. It’s been funny, after being immersed in systems that perform at 8 Gbit or 10 Gbit for a few years, to watch my little PC poke along at what seems like 1 MB/hr, if that.

But still. At least I have a backup. Finally. And I can finally rid my closet of that skeleton.

Now my issue becomes off-site disaster recovery. It’s far more likely that my hard drive(s) will crash than that my house will be napalmed or something (knock on wood), but no sooner had I told Tory that he could stop bugging me about backup, than he started bugging me about taking the drive to my office once the data transfer is done.

But the AutoBackup software, like so many low-end and consumer backup offerings, is set to automatically backup changed files, and what I told Tory was, I like having a low RPO over here. And I made that napalm comment, I’ll admit (I can just feel karma coming to get me). So I’m thinking about some kind of backup SaaS for off-site DR, but capacity with those services is at a much higher premium than it is in 3.5 inch external SATA. And so you know what that means…data classification!

I may be poking along at 1 MB/hr, but it all feels like a slow-motion, small-scale version of the issues I cover every day. It’s interesting to see firsthand how ”Digital Life ™” is, in fact, blurring the boundaries between home and business computing.