Disruptive Proactivity

Interesting competition for what to do with 100Drobos?

Apple recently announced the iCloud, which is not about storing your data in the Cloud, but about storing your data via the Cloud. 5Gb of storage isn’t much; it just passes through on its’ way to your devices. Much the same way that real clouds aren’t storage devices for water, they just hold it for a while while it moves from one place to another.

So, taking that analogy further, what would I do with a 100 drobos attached to slow network connections?

Fill them with all the below, and send them to the 100 most (potentially) effective small ngo-training NGOs in the country. Not with the raw content, but mashedup and structured into such that it’s usable by people who haven’t been through the training school for what all the words are used to mean, but who need to know to make their organisations effective.

That’s easy enough to do on the web, but without good internet links (e.g. In a training room attached only over ADSL), that rich immersive experience is difficult online. But as the iCloud implementation shows, it’s not syncing, but caching while the other devices catch up. Push data to the cloud as fast as possible, and then pull it down when it can. While

For home, I’ll get an Apple Time Capsule that can permanently grab a copy of all my iCloud data as soon as they release it, that same method can be used to push data elsewhere for purposes that are much more useful than my pictures of cats.

And a really good use for 100drobos.

Another idea is to lend them to the “unnamed organisation” to move their data, as a practical suggestion of how not to get locked in to a data centre when you have 2Pb of data. Sigh.