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With everything from presidential debates to music to photo-filled personal homepages now on the 'Net, this may be the year that so-called rich media truly came alive.
At the same time, that proliferation has lead to the increasingly expensive but unavoidable costs of the storage to sustain the content operations necessary to feed rich media to millions of U.S. broadband users.
A San Francisco-based start up, ScaleEight, has launched what it calls a new storage model for rich media providers, geared to offer massive, scalable amounts of storage at a fraction of its earlier cost.
The year-old company already has converted several high profile companies from beta testers to customers for its Media Store service, among them a Sony-backed venture, Unsurface, which is expected to launch a "digital locker" service for consumers before the end of the year. Unsurface reportedly will let users store and access megabytes of music movies, pictures, video games and other digital media from Sony properties. Akamai announced on Oct. 10 that it also will begin using ScaleEight services for its 2,100 customers.
"We spent the first six months working out the technology, and the last six months beta testing with several different types of companies that offer music, video and other content delivery services" says Dave McDonald, Scale Eight's vice president of finance and administration. "Now we're hoping to make those beta testers customers, and we're expecting more announcements in the near future."
The demand for storing increasingly commonplace media files that tend to be very large-anywhere from a 3 MB MP3 music file to a 5 gigabyte DVD movie-is exploding along with their popularity. Even everyday applications soon will begin to strain current networked storage architectures. For example, if 10 percent of Yahoo's users want to display five "rolls" of film on their personal home page, the storage requirement is 120 terabytes.
Average storage costs can range from $40,000-$50,000 per month for a terabyte of data. Already data storage alone accounts for as much as 50 percent of a content provider's IT budget, according to a recent report by IDC. Scale Eight service costs about $25,000 per terabyte per month. At the same time, the service guarantees 99.99 percent uptime.
"One of the largest line items in the budget for an Internet start-up is an EMC box," says Joshua Coates, Scale Eight's founder and chief technical officer, referring to one of the largest storage vendors. "The economic model for our service is a fraction of the cost of traditional storage."
According to Doug Chandler, an analyst with IDC, "Current enterprise storage solutions do not necessarily lend themselves to efficient, wide-area delivery of very large files. Enterprise storage systems can become increasingly expensive to manage, as storage capacity is added and higher performance levels are required."
The core of the Scale Eight solution is a patented technology that uses a distributed architecture to achieve cheap, scalable storage for customers. Unlike traditional enterprise storage architectures, Scale Eight's technology is based on small, very high-capacity servers and disk drive nodes, which are deployed in large numbers in Scale Eight's Storage Centers. The company currently has two Storage Centers, in San Jose, Calif., and Vienna, Va. It plans to expand into Europe and Japan over the next six months.
"With today's rich media content explosion, it's not uncommon for companies to require terabytes or even petabytes of Internet storage that must be served on-demand to millions of Internet users," says Coates. "This need, which cannot be appropriately met by enterprise storage vendors, requires a new parallel storage architecture, which is why Scale Eight is introducing the MediaStore service."
The 26-year old Coates is a former software engineer for Inktomi. David Patterson, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley who helped develop the Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) storage technology, was a technical advisor in establishing the venture. The company, which has 75 employees, has received $31.5 million in funding from backers including, Oak Investment Partners and InterWest Partners.
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