What if Microsoft and Danger #Cloudfail turns out to be a #SANfail?

Why can't it be both?<p>As far as I can tell, "cloud" generally means someone else stores my data and the only way I can get to it is via the Net. In that case it's absolutely a failure of the "cloud".<p>And if the data was stored on a SAN, it's a SAN failure. If someone didn't do backups at all, it's a backup failure.<p>What's with all the labeling? Look, if I pay someone else to manage my data, and they screw it up and I suffer data loss, it doesn't really matter what piece of gear or level of process is responsible -- someone still screwed up.

The fact that this whole thing is being considered a "cloud" failure is ridiculous. The word has become so meaningless that if I ran over a neighbors dog I could probably blame it on cloud computing.

I know virtually nothing about SANs, other than that they are frighteningly expensive. Can anyone clarify how they compare to systems such as GFS, HDFS, MogileFS and other systems that attempt to store data in a safe, redundant manner across lots of cheap servers?

Uh,<p>Sorry but "cloud" or not, SAN or not, the MS/Danger fail was a stunning failure of <i>process</i>. Who cares what the underlying technology was or how it failed? What matters is that a multi-billion dollar software company actually managed to loose, <i>permanently</i>, their customers' data through obvious carelessness, through either lack of a backup in some fashion or other (and don't even try to argue they could have had an excuse - <i>"multi-billion dollar company"</i> <i>"reputation"</i> backups might be sort-of hard maybe - perhaps - but MS is supposed <i>know what it's doing</i>). Lightning and Asteroids wouldn't strike five different carefully chosen locations...<p>My guess is that this will hit MS really hard over time. Even if they actually were hoping Danger would dry-up and blow away, they've now done the worst case scenario to <i>customers</i>. Repeat after me "never let MS near your data...".

When it comes to important data users should mistrust everyone and everything. It is more difficult to backup data from most cloud sources. There's no easy way to backup my entire Flickr account, Facebook profile, or Google account for example. To backup Gmail I have to rely on desktop applications via IMAP. Is this really acceptable? Why don't we have more sites offering easy offline backups? No matter how you look at it the user has to be responsible for their own data. If cloud services are not making this easy to do then we have a legitimate problem.

Can we just point out that it was clearly a #BackupFail ?<p>No matter <i>WHAT</i> the deployment mode was, the lack of backups is what has turned this into an issue, NOT the SAN or "Cloud" failure.

this industry is embronic and more innovation will occur. I love the cloud market very compelling and important for entrepreneurs and big businesses.<p>We will all be renting computing and storage in the short future.