A nice review of the concept(s) I’m about to discuss can be found at GeekFluent; link below. Yes, it’s a dated post but I don’t do anything in a hurry. Read up, here:
EMC Announces Joint Isilon/Syncplicity File Sharing Solution | GeekFluent.
I don’t shill for EMC products, well, ever. Maybe just this once, though, I’ll make an exception.
I’ve been using Syncplicity (and every other Dropbox/iCloud/etc. service) for as long as they’ve been around, I spent a year living in the Atmos world and I have other applications, like Allway Sync, with their own use cases in “production” here at the Kraatz data cavern. The reason is simple and I’ve mentioned it before: I’ve got a TON of data to manage across about 20 devices.
Can I tell you what a pain in the rear it is to have 8TB of personal data without access to enterprise tools for managing it all? If you can grasp that nonsense, imagine having 8 PETAbytes of the stuff lying around, clogging up e-mail, file shares and the random home drives. That’s the day-to-day of my typical client.
The problem isn’t so much storing the stuff; that’s easy. Aside from the whole “please, can we delete some of this crap?” issue, the problem is finding it and getting the right files in the right person’s hands. That’s my problem and it’s usually called Knowledge Management. When someone wants a sample deliverable, methodology, contract or tool they don’t look in our file shares, they call me. They call me because they read my blog and know I organize my files like a crazed librarian. It doesn’t hurt that I used to work in a library and know at least a little about how people search for content.
I appreciate the fact that they call me; it means I’m doing something right and my content is relevant. I don’t have time to play librarian, though. That’s where Syncplicity has been a home run.
Since we own the company, I have no problem sharing my company confidential documentation through their cloud. What’s better is if I DIDN’T work for EMC I could be using the same tool to synchronize my material with an on premise Isilon solution. That fact, right there, makes this a unique tool. As GeekFluent mentions, the big concern in file sharing through Dropbox, iCloud and (pick your provider) is that you just don’t know where the data lives or who’s poking at it. It’s a psychological issue more than a real data privacy issue (you don’t hesitate to hand over your credit card at a restaurant, do you?) but it’s a force to be reckoned with. This solution obviates the problem by enabling a simple, on premise private storage cloud without complicated doo-dads and gee-gaws. It just goes.
What would be an incredible marriage is if Syncplicity would marry up to Atmos cloud storage so we could implement data management policies across a globally distributed private cloud infrastructure. This would deliver speedy access worldwide along with data mobility, protection and deletion policies. File access from a browser? No problem. Mobile? Done. Laptop or tablet? Gotcha. Duplicate data eradicated? Sold. Let’s get that one in the hopper, Engineering. I know you’ve already got some of those goods on Isilon but let’s go all-in. Most of the use case for Sharepoint in my world is wrapped up in simple file organization and distribution and Sharepoint doesn’t make that terribly easy.
I’d ask for an “amen” there but you were too distracted by the pop-up window from Sharepoint asking you to login for the 4th time since you started reading this post.
What I need now is some employee pricing on Isilon and I’ll have the house all squared away with Syncplicity/Isilon private cloud storage. That 12TB model was looking pretty sweet. Maybe somebody in product management will read this and drop ship one over as a “consumer grade” beta test.
Yeah, probably not, but I can dream, can’t I?
