Thursday, September 15, 2011  Thoughts on Bitcasa  Bitcasa has
been getting a lot of attention in my Google Plus circles the
past week or so; I suspect this is because it was in the running
for TechCrunch's Disrupt prize (but ultimately lost to something
called "Shaker", which appears to me to be some sort of virtual
bar simulation). Bitcasa claims to offer "infinite" storage on
desktop computers for a fixed monthly fee. I've yet to see any
solid technical information on how they're doing this, but it
seems to me that they're planning to do this by storing your
data in the cloud and using the local hard drive as a cache.
There's nothing earthshattering about this; I set up Tivoli
Hierarchical Storage Manager to store infrequently used files on
lower-priority storage media (either cheap NAS arrays or tape)
four years ago with my last employer, and the technology was
fairly mature then. Putting the HSM server, data stores, or both
in the cloud was possible even then and should be even more so
now that cloud se