Until now, all we’ve known about Pi Corp., the startup EMC purchased in February, were that it was still in stealth, and that its software was meant to provide access to content on multiple types of Web-enabled devices.

While that description makes sense, it also is vague enough to leave open the possibility of several different directions that type of technology could go in. I had imagined it transcoding things like movies and music for streaming delivery to iPhones as well as PCs, for example, or reformatting Word documents to be read on both laptops and Blackberries by corporate mobile workers.

But a little more information has come out about Pi since the acquisition, at PiWorx.com. You can download a product demo, which unfortunately my system specs on my standard-issue laptop don’t support, but there’s also a walk-through of the software’s features and screenshots.

What it reminds me of most is Flickr — except with music, documents and other content types. Rather than making a “photostream,” it looks like it can create multimedia personal sites or collections for sharing that bring together those different types of content.

It also looks like the product would offer services like those available with network-enabled external hard drives for consumers that allow content to be accessed from the Web, but on a much bigger scale. Those external devices allow access to every piece of data in the repository to the owner of the password/admin rights for the system. This would let people share content selectively with more complex authentication.

So, let’s just say you’re a news writer at a storage conference and you need to see that PowerPoint from last week, but you’re in the middle of the show floor and your laptop’s upstairs. Let’s also say you don’t own an iPhone or PDA. The idea behind PiWorx, if I’m understanding correctly, is that you could go to one of the stations set up for people to check their Webmail, log in and call up the PowerPoint online.

I still wonder if this software will be sold to corporations for internal use as well as deployed as part of EMC’s Fortress?  Despite an emphatic PiWorx message about data security, I still think storage admins would be more keen to use this type of thing if the content delivery networks and storage repositories were their own, and access to the information was limited to the employees or authorized partners of the company.

Then again, I’m not a storage admin. Any thoughts from those in the peanut gallery?

HP has taken the wraps off a new online storage service for consumers and small offices, called HP Upline. The service has three levels: Home and Home Office, Family Account and Professional Account. Home accounts include one license, unlimited storage, online backup and basic support for $59 per year; a family account adds 3 licenses and a management dashboard for $149 per year; and a professional account gets 3 licenses, expandable to 100, as well as priority support.

The product is limited to PCs and doesn’t include some of the more advanced features being offered by online storage services such as file versioning. However, it does offer users the ability to tag content for later search and share, and to publish files online using the service through a feature called the Upline Library.

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. Symantec has focused its backup software as a service (SaaS) within its Windows-centric Backup Exec product, traditionally sold into smaller shops; EMC’s Mozy Enterprise service, despite the name, is at this point recommended only for workstation-level backup. However, a “hybrid” approach for larger shops is now being proposed by EMC.

EMC and IDC have published an update to their Digital Universe report, which met with skepticism when it was originally published last March. We’re generally skeptical of vendor-sponsored analyst reports around here, too, but there was one data point that jumped out at me in this report: over the next three years, 70% of information will be created by individuals but 85% of it will be managed by corporations.

Even more interestingly, the report says the majority of that data created by individuals won’t be created consciously. We are sprouting digital “shadows” such as credit card numbers, bank records, health records, etc., which are increasingly used to identify us and conduct business in the modern economy.

So, to review, in the future, 70% of the information EMC makes money storing will be yours, but it probably won’t be controlled or even consciously generated by you.

EMC’s message around this report is that businesses are going to need to be more aware of this personal digital information, because it’s going to put strain on their storage systems, and also because given the statistics above, individuals are going to be counting on businesses to store and manage their information in a way that preserves privacy and the integrity of the data.

Even where corporate storage managers aren’t directly in the business of information retention for consumers, virtually everyone is going to have to worry about data “hygiene” with the increasing blend of business and personal information on portable devices such as laptops and PDAs. This is something my Storage Soup colleague Tory Skyers has thought and spoken a lot about, including some presentations at Storage Decisions, and it’s still a problem without a clear solution for many in corporate IT.  

For users already struggling with that issue, the EMC / IDC report has some further bad news:

• The digital universe in 2007 - at 2.25 x 1021 bits (281 exabytes or 281 billion gigabytes) - was 10% bigger than we thought. The resizing comes as a result of faster growth in cameras, digital TV shipments, and better understanding of information replication.
• By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006.
• As forecast, the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home.

Yahoo bought Zimbra Inc.  today for $350 million. The New York Times reports that the acquisition is meant to help Yahoo better compete with Google, and its GMail service, which Google has begun to offer to businesses this year.

We’ve covered GMail quite a bit, both on the main news site and this blog. We covered the launch of Google Apps for Enterprise and its 10 GB inbox, and then spoke with one early adopter of the Apps on how he’d used it to save time and money on email storage. We’ve also discussed some of the “gotchas” with software as a service for enterprises, and fielded Google’s response to those points. Finally, we’ve seen Yahoo peeking over Google’s shoulder a bit, with its announcement of unlimited inbox capacity for its webmail.

Shortly after enterprise storage experts started questioning the security and compliance of Google’s offering, the company went out and bought an enterprise archiving player, Postini. By that time, analysts were remarking that software as a service, particularly for email archiving and backup, is officially back. “People now will say, ‘oh, no one’s going to get rid of Exchange’,” ESG analyst Brian Babineau said at the time. “But it’s a generational thing — newly graduated employees are joining businesses from college already standardized on Gmail, and many corporations are saying, why manage Exchange when employees are already used to this Web-based, outsourced interface?”

It appears Yahoo sees the same writing on the wall. Today, like Google, they purchased another company to bring in some enterprise-level expertise for their email SaaS.

The storage market is already a little bit familiar with Zimbra. It’s an open-source messaging system, so most of the product’s features have little to do with storage, per se. But Zimbra also began announcing archiving customers recently, including an ISP in Dallas, Texas, that plans to offer Zimbra archiving to its customers in local K-12 school districts.

As with Postini, the company that Google acquired, Zimbra’s software has most of the features on the enterprise email archiving checklist, including automatic .pst file discovery and migration, and the ability to index, search and export messages or mailboxes for e-discovery and compliance purposes.

Where it differs from other products is the fact that it can support multiple email systems, including Exchange, Lotus, Domino and GroupWise, as well as its own email application, and can support messages from any combination of those applications in the same repository, the company claims. A disadvantage for Yahooo, meanwhile, is that Zimbra’s archiving product is relatively unproven in the market, having just become generally available July 23.

Interestingly enough, Google had an announcement of its own today–the release of Google Presentations, a Web-based competitor to PowerPoint. Clearly, Google is going after Microsoft hard, but over in this little corner of the IT market, I’m having a bit of a chuckle today–in responding to the “gotchas” in a Q&A with Storage Soup back in April, Google Enterprise product manager Rajen Sheth told me the following:

We’re definitely not trying to duplicate Microsoft Office. The way I would think of it is that Office is very well designed for individual productivity–an individual preparing something to present to a group of people. We’re focusing Google Docs and Spreadsheets on collaborative use case scenarios.

We’ll never know if Google saw an opportunity and changed its mind or if the market taking off influenced its decision to release Presentations. But one thing is clear as this trend continues, with reports also out this week that Facebook is contemplating throwing its hat into the application-storage ring as well: Web 2.0 giants are fast becoming the successors to Microsoft and IBM as the dominant force in computing of the 21st century. The more news I see like this, the more I’m inclined to side with Babineau–the times, they are a-changin’. 

Once upon a time in the storage market, storage service providers were all the rage. Then, the tech bubble burst and most of them went the way of the dodo bird.

But with storage growth in recent years forcing companies to consider new strategies for managing data, storage service providers are making a comeback. Within that market space, meanwhile, backup and recovery is the most popular area, as users struggle with the cost of protecting more and more data, the distraction of backup and recovery management from core business and IT operations, and ever-increasing regulation.

Naturally, this is the market where the lion’s share of new players are springing up. EMC Corp. and Symantec Corp. are among the heavy hitters that say they’re planning backup SaaS. But there are also some new and emerging vendors that are gaining attention in the market with the return of interest in outsourcing.

One of the companies that’s made its presence known in recent weeks is Nirvanix Inc., which is aiming to be a business-to-business outsourcer for large companies. It’s come out of the gate overtly challenging Amazon’s S3 service, saying it can overcome the performance issues that have been reported by some large S3 users. The service is also offering a 99.9% uptime SLA to customers.

Nirvanix claims it can offer better performance because it is constructing a global network of storage “nodes” based on the way Web content delivery systems work — by moving the storage and processing power closer to the user, cutting down on network latency.

Within each of Nirvanix’s storage nodes is a global namespace layered over a clustered file system, running on Dell servers residing in colocation facilities. These nodes also perform automatic load balancing by making multiple copies of ”popular” files and spreading them over different servers within the cluster. With this storage infrastructure, the company is claiming that it can offer users a wider pipe as well as a faster one, allowing file transfers of up to 256 GB. Moving forward, according to CEO Patrick Harr, the company plans to offer an archival node for “cold storage” within 6 months.

One potential issue for the company in comparison to S3 is a lack of financial clout to match Amazon. Building out the storage node infrastructure will be an expensive proposition in comparison to creating software and running a typical data center, and so far, the company says it has received just $12 million in funding, some from venture capital firms and some from research grants. However, it also says 25 customers have already signed up for beta testing, and says one of those customers is supporting 50 million end users.

Base pricing for the service is 18 cents per stored gigabyte per month, a “slight premium” over Amazon’s price according to Harr. The company is hoping that it can increase sales volume and drive down the price.

Meanwhile, on the consumer/SMB side, a company called Intronis LLC is souping up its features in the hopes of gaining traction in the low end of the storage market. Version 3.0 of its eSureIT backup service will allow users to create a tapelike rotation scheme for files, creating backup sets and setting policies for data retention on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis. The company has added a plugin it calls Before and After, which will allow users to create scripts dictating what their computer systems should do before, during or after engaging with the Intronis service — for example, the script can have the user’s machine shut down applications prior to backup and restart them after backup has finished. Another new plugin will allow mailbox and message-level backups and restores of Exchange databases, and adds a text search for email repositories.

But the biggest new development, and the one that’s taken it the better part of two years to develop, according to Sam Gutmann, co-founder and CEO, is a feature the company is calling Intelliblox, which like other enterprise-level backup services such as Asigra, backs up only changed blocks over the wire. The feature uses a set of checksum and hashing algorithms to identify blocks and keep them together with their corresponding files (an existing feature of Intronis’s service is total separation between the company’s admins and users’ data — each user is given an encryption key to access its storage at Intronis’s data center, and Intronis says it has no way of reading any of its customer data).

This use of hashing algorithms also has this blogger wondering if they might also be able to offer fixed-content archiving down the road.