Winning products in this year's Storage magazine and SearchStorage Products of the Year contest for the enterprise cloud storage category illustrate the movement toward hybrid and multi-cloud. Promising startups LucidLink and Hammerspace and object storage specialist Scality snared top honors.

The newly crowned gold, silver and bronze medalists took their cues from major enterprise cloud storage trends and focused on access and management of large sets of data that can span multiple on-premises and public cloud systems. Like many storage vendors, winners target the growing number of organizations taking a hybrid or multi-cloud approach to address application needs in a more cost-efficient way.

Gold medalist LucidLink, a startup with offices in California, Bulgaria and Germany, impressed judges with its new Filespaces cloud file service that can accelerate access to data in globally distributed cloud object stores.

Startup Hammerspace, based in Los Altos, Calif., won silver with its eponymous data-as-a-service product that launched in October 2018. The Hammerspace data virtualization technology aims to help customers access and manage files and objects stored in private and public clouds whenever and wherever they need it.

Well-established object and file storage vendor Scality captured third place with a major upgrade to its flagship Ring software that features multi-cloud data management and orchestration technology for large-scale hybrid cloud environments.

All entries in the enterprise cloud storage category run on standard server hardware with no dependencies on underlying hardware. Products eligible for consideration included file systems not tied to specific storage arrays, software that pools and centrally manages storage across servers or cloud object stores, and gateway appliances for cloud backup and replication.

LucidLink CEO Peter Thompson and CTO George Dochev sought to combine the cost advantages of cloud object storage with the performance of NAS systems in the startup's Filespaces cloud service that launched in the spring of 2019.

The LucidLink cloud-native file system can run on top of any S3-based object store and enable streaming read/write access to data from any location. The technology splits metadata from the data and synchronizes it locally. Users and applications connect to the same namespace and employ Filespaces as a local shared volume.

"This is a file system overlay on S3 object storage," noted one judge. "Most object storage [systems], including open source [software], have file system overlays, except AWS, Azure, [Google Cloud Platform], IBM cloud object storage. That's where this plays. Persistent caching and prefetching is a key advantage for [LucidLink's] file system."

LucidLink uses multiple parallel data streams, local write-back caching for frequently accessed data, in-line compression and a proprietary adaptive algorithm to facilitate prefetching and reduce latency in cloud environments. Filespaces supports encryption of data and metadata in transit and at rest for security, snapshots to restore data in the event of a ransomware attack or system outage and global file locking to enable remote users to collaborate. Administrators can control which parts of the filespace a given user can access.

One judge said LucidLink's Filespaces approach improves on concepts of existing enterprise file sync and share and cloud NAS options. "File sync and share creates too much opportunity for the wrong data to be on the wrong systems, and cloud NAS solutions have the potential to create too big of a bottleneck," he said.

Filespaces pricing is based on the number of connected devices and amount of storage capacity managed per month. The least-expensive configuration uses Wasabi enterprise cloud storage. Pricing starts at $10 per month with five connected devices and 1 TB of capacity.

Runner-up Hammerspace abstracts data from the underlying storage infrastructure to enable users to locate and manage files and objects independent of their location through a universal global namespace that can span multiple on-premises and public cloud sites.

Hammerspace extracts and stores sophisticated metadata that provides data's physical location. Users can non-disruptively add metadata to files and set policies to automatically react to changes and move data. Hammerspace supports site-to-site data transfers and tiering to cloud storage.

Customers can opt to specify where they want to store data or let Hammerspace's data control plane make decisions. Hammerspace uses telemetry, machine learning and optimization technologies to determine the storage that best meets a customer's performance, protection and cost needs.

Hammerspace's scale-out data services enable parallel I/O across storage resources to boost performance. The services support NFS and SMB file protocols and Amazon's S3 object storage API.

It can move data through the global namespace during active read/write operations so workloads can non-disruptively scale up and down on demand across storage systems and clouds. The product compresses and globally deduplicates data and uses WAN optimization technology to minimize network traffic.

"Hybrid storage has been great in concept, less great in execution," one judge said. "Hammerspace seems to provide a big part of what has been missing to make hybrid seamless and efficient."

Hammerspace runs on physical or virtual servers located on premises or in public clouds such as AWS, Azure and Google. The startup added a Kubernetes container storage interface driver for container-based deployments last spring. Consumption-based pricing for Hammerspace starts at 80 cents per gigabyte, per year for hot, active data and 5 cents per gigabyte, per year for cold data.

"The service's approach to separating the data plane from the control plane makes this a promising storage technology," one judge said. "It also has solid support for integrating with other systems, with lots of thought given to management."

The most important enhancement in Scality's Ring8 file and object storage software is multi-cloud eXtended Data Management (XDM) that enables users to orchestrate data across on-premises private and public clouds.

Scality began selling the technology as a separate product under the name Zenko in 2018 and added XDM to Ring8 a year later. XDM separates metadata from data and creates a global metadata namespace to enable customers to view and search for information and set policies to migrate data. Supported private cloud options include Ring, Dell EMC and NetApp NAS, and Ceph. Public cloud support extends to AWS, Azure, Google, Digital Ocean and Wasabi.

"This offering will be helpful for many enterprises experiencing rapid evolution and particularly so for those with edge compute requirements because of its ability to integrate dispersed and dissimilar data and data management activities," one judge said.

"This enables multiple Rings in the same or distributed locations to appear and function as a single system for data access and movement," another judge noted.

Scality improved security in Ring8 with support for role-based access control, the Key Management Interoperability Protocol 1.2, Security Assertion Markup Language/Active Directory and Security-Enhanced Linux.

Other Ring8 features include support for Amazon's S3 bucket lifecycle transition and bucket notification APIs, the Queens release of the OpenStack Swift API and NFS version 4. Scality also enhanced multi-tenancy for service providers with support for S3-based quotas and AWS Identity and Access Management bucket policies.

"Scality is a proven veteran of the object storage market. They continue to innovate, making the platform easier for legacy applications to store data onto and making it easier to connect the solution to multiple clouds," one judge said.

List pricing for Ring8 with XDM is $150 per terabyte based on protected capacity. Scality also continues to sell the separate Zenko product.

Find out who won top honors in each of the five categories in the 2019 Products of the Year competition.

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Top enterprise cloud storage systems win 2019 Products of the Year - TechTarget

What would you do if you were to run out of space on iCloud, at Google, or in Dropbox? Adam Engst provides a detailed guide on how to deal with such a situation before you lose email and files stop syncing, without paying for more storage. Have you been frustrated by Web sites that block standard Mac keyboard shortcuts, hijack scroll behavior and contextual menus, and prevent copy and paste? Josh Centers reviews the StopTheMadness app, which can restore all of those features and more in all your favorite browsers. Jeff Porten continues his coverage of CES 2020 with a look at some of the more ambitious technologies demoed at the show. Notable Mac app releases this week include Pixelmator Pro 1.5.5, Bookends, Fantastical 3.0.4, OmniFocus 3.5, and Merlin Project 6.1.

Have you run across Web sites that steal control of your Web browser so you cant copy text or use standard system functions? StopTheMadness can give you back control over your browser.

After being warned by both iCloud and Gmail that he was running low on storage space, Adam Engst embarked on a mission to free up cloud space rather than pay for more than he needs. If your clouds are filling up too, follow along to avoid missing email, failing file syncs, and more.

Low power and a clean environment turned out to be the themes of this years batch of what was notable at the part of CES dedicated to startups.

Brings improvements to the recently added ML Super Resolution feature. ($39.99 new, free update, 189 MB)

Enhances the Bookends Browser with faster page loading and improved compatibility with Web pages using complex Javascript. ($59.99 new, free update, 50.9 MB)

Maintenance update for the recently upgraded calendar app corrects bugs and smooths over some rough spots. ($39.99 annual subscription new, free update from version 3, 21.8 MB)

Fixes a lengthy list of bugs and now requires macOS 10.14 Mojave. ($39.99 new, free update, 39.9 MB)

Mixes new export-related features with a couple of bug fixes. ($149 annual subscription, free update, 29.1 MB)

Follow this link:
#1501: How to deal with low cloud storage space, StopTheMadness fixes unfriendly Web sites, clean tech and more from CES 2020 - TidBITS

CLEVELAND Everyone enjoys taking selfies and family photos with their phones. Its convenient and simple.

But are you taking the steps to make sure those memories last forever. If not, you should change your ways.

Bad luck hits when you least expect it. You never know when you'll drop your phone on the ground or, even worse, in the toilet.

Using a cloud storage solution is probably your best bet for backing up the thousands of photos you likely have on your phone or computer.

There are a few different options.

iCloud:

This is probably the best option if you're part of the Apple ecosystem of devices. It's simple to use and allows access to your photos online on all of your devices. You get a minimal amount of storage free, but you'll probably want to opt for a paid option.

Prices start at $0.99 for 50GB of storage.

Google Photos:

My favorite choice for Google users and anyone who wants to store a lot of photos free of charge. Google allows uses to store an unlimited number of compressed photos at no charge. You also get 15GB of free storage with a Google account using Google Drive.

If that's not enough, you can pay for more. Options start at $1.99 each month for 100GB of storage.

Dropbox:

Mainly known for file sharing, Dropbox is also a top-notch photo storage solution. They'll start you off with 2GB of free storage and offer a couple paid options. The most used is probably the 1TB plan which is $9.99 each month.

You can also set your device to auto-upload photos and sync across multiple devices included your computer.

Microsoft OneDrive:

If you already pay for Microsoft Office, this is an awesome solution. They'll give you 1TB of free storage with a personal account. Even if you don't opt for the paid option, they'll give you 2GB free or 100GB for just $2 each month.

This is also a great option for those with Windows-based computers since it will automatically sync photos and files via the cloud to your computer and phones with the app installed.

Amazon Photos:

This is probably Amazon's best kept secret. If you already have a membership for Amazon Prime, you'll probably be glad to know that you already have an unlimited photo storage option. As long as you're a member Amazon will keep as many photos as you can take with no extra cost to your membership. They also have apps for Android and iOS for you to easily set your device to auto-upload new photos.

External Hard Drive:

In addition to one of the cloud solutions above, I also recommend that you keep your files on an external hard drive that you physically have access to. This drive will serve as a back to your cloud solution.

The price of hard drives have come down lately. And I highly recommend you choose a Solid-state drive, which are more reliable than moving disks.

Bottom Line:

The process of backing up your photos and videos can be tedious at first. But in the long-run, you'll appreciate having those memories last a lifetime -- and hopefully pass them down a few generations. Buying photo books and archiving printed photos may be a thing of the past, but you'll want a way to remember your best days (or maybe not).

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List: The best ways to protect your pictures - WKYC.com

We are always worried about filling up the available space in cloud storage services as they usually offer limited storage. We try to manage the space as much as we can. But what if you get a random notification saying that your Google Drive is full? You must be wondering why does the Google Drive state its full. Lets find the answer and how to fix it in this post.

The Google Drive full notification would have been fine, if it was actually full. While some users get the notification when Google Drive is empty, the Google Drive space doesnt update even after deleting data for others. So whats happening? Whats the hidden data thats not visible to you?

Lets check out various ways how to fix Google Drive shows full but no files in it issue.

Google Drive storage is part of your overall Google account storage. So you need to check what product of Google is taking up the storage. Read our detailed post covering what counts in Google Drive storage.

For this post, its important to mention the basics. Google storage covers space for Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos. You can check the available storage at https://one.google.com/storage.

If Google Drive is showing less storage as compared to others, you need to free up space using the other two. For Gmail, you can delete the attachments. In the case of Google Photos, you can convert the photos to High quality. Then, they will not take up storage.

If Google Drive is taking more storage, then check the following methods.

Some files may be still available on Google Drive. To check all the available files, open https://drive.google.com/drive/quota using a browser on your phone or web. Tap on the Storage used option to change the sort order from large to small. If some huge files are still visible, delete them.

You should also check the files at https://drive.google.com/drive/computers. Here you will find the files that were backed up from your computer. Delete them if not needed. However, do note that if you are still syncing them to the computer, they will be removed from your PC too.

Sometimes, when you delete a folder from Google Drive, the files within it arent deleted. Such files are known as orphan files. They arent visible directly in Drive. You can view them by searching the keyword is:unorganized owner:me. If files show up, delete them if not needed or move them to a folder to make them visible.

Tip: On the web, you can delete the files by dragging them to the Trash folder.

If you use Google Drive to backup data from third-party apps, such data will also take up storage. To view such hidden data, follow these steps:

Step 1: Open drive.google.com from a browser.

Step 2: Click on the settings icon at the top and select Settings from it.

Step 3: On the pop-up that opens, click on Manage Apps from the left side. Scroll down, and you will see the data taken up by apps. Click on Options next to the app and select Delete hidden app data if you no longer require the data.

Tip: Find out how to remove connected apps from Google Drive.

When you delete files from Google Drive, they are not deleted permanently. They are taken to the Trash or Bin folder where they stay until you empty your trash bin manually. So, if Google Drive is showing full, you need to empty the bin to clear the storage.

Open the Google Drive website. Click on the Bin option from the left sidebar. Click on Bin drop-down at the top and select Empty Bin. Refresh the page and check the available storage.

Open the Drive app. Tap on the three-bar icon at the top and select Trash.

Then, select all the files. Hit the three-dot icon at the top and select Delete forever. Restart your phone.

On iOS, tap on the three-bar icon at the top in the Drive app and select Bin. Then, tap on the three-dot icon at the top and choose Empty bin. Restart your phone.

If, after emptying the Trash, Google Drive still doesnt free up storage, you should sign out from it. Then, sign in again.

If you are checking the available storage from an Android phone, clear the cache for the Drive app. Clearing cache will not delete the files as it is different from clearing data.

To clear cache for Google Drive, open Settings on your phone and go to Apps & notifications or Installed apps. Look for Google Drive under All apps. Tap on Storage inside Google Drive. Finally, tap on Clear cache. Restart your phone.

Tip: You should also clear the cache for Google Drive web.

A great way to make sure Google has updated the storage is to check on another device. If you deleted the files from a phone, check on the web and vice versa.

The key to success is having patience. If you deleted a large number of files from Google Drive, you should wait for at least 24 hours after trying the above steps before panicking. Hopefully, the updated storage would reflect then, and you will not get the storage is full error on Google Drive.

Next up:Did you know Google Drive can be used as an FTP server or network drive? Find out how to do so from the next link.

Last updated on 18 Feb, 2020

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8 Best Ways to Fix Google Drive Storage Full But No Files in It Issue - Guiding Tech

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TAGS: Cloud Storage Market Size, Cloud Storage Market Growth, Cloud Storage Market Forecast, Cloud Storage Market Analysis, Cloud Storage Market Trends, Cloud Storage Market

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Cloud Storage Market Analysis With Key Players, Applications, Trends and Forecast To 2026 - Instant Tech News