Recently HP announced a new service to share files easily over Internet. The service is a subscription model where a subscriber will use a web browser to publish and share files. The service also come with some cool features like password-protected sharing, automatic backup process, and data migration from old PC to new PC. While the service seems to be aiming at consumers and small businesses who are burdened with storage growth at the edge and don't have many sophisticated backup/recovery, migration software options at economical prices. This service charges $299/yr for an unlimited storage and seems like good deal to me.
But the real question is who gets the maximum value out of this deal. If we take a small business which spends about 500GB-1TB of storage for every 2 years and let us assume most of this growth is in the NAS space, that is mostly files and majority of them is related to Exchange data, then you can see the connection. Why are emails growing terribly fast? Because of the attachments. the average size of attachment in my own email box has grown from 500KB in 2001 to 3.5MB in 2007, if just plot the percentage of email storage based on attachment size, I notice that 90% of storage is occupied by attachments of size 1M - 15M, but they represent less than 1% of total messages. So the bottom line is that if I take all the attachments from my own inbox, I can save up to 90% of storage growth. Email is not an optimal solution for attachments. We can clearly see where HP's Upline is going after. Even if they didn't think about email attachments, that is the place where they have good bet on this type of service.
My Personal Email Data
1 comment:
Good reasoning on the email attachments. It does open door for the thought about the biggest storage items in a person's digital belongings.
There is enough talk about addressing photos, music and video as separate digital data and providing applications to manage. Your point that email still is the converging point of all the digital is well taken.
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