HP Announces Data Storage in the Cloud via "Upline"

Ah yes, how many online data storage services are there? Unlike that old saying about "there's something you don't see every day," a new data storage service in the "cloud" seems a daily occurrence. But here's something we don't see every day: an announcement about such a service by a company as large as HP.

All these services purport to back and and store your data safely in the "cloud." HP's Upline has 3 different plan tiers (plus a free limited trial with 1 GB of storage for a year).

The tiers (all have unlimited storage) are:

• Home & Home Office: $59 / year, 1 license, basic support
• Family: $149 / year, 3 licenses, Dashboard, basic support
• Professional: $299 / year, 3 licenses, expandable to 100 ($79 / additional license), Dashboard, priority support
  

The Dashboard, BTW, is a way to manage and track the usage of employee accounts within a small business ... or, I suppose, family (just how much porn is my son uploading?).

Here's what HP is advertising:

• File sharing and remote access – share files of any size by emailing a password protected and time-limited link rather than an attachment. What, file sharing!? The RIAA might have something to say about this.
• Remote access – enjoy greater productivity on the go with the ability to open, edit, share and publish files from any Internet-connected PC using a secured log-in and password.
• File publishing – publicly share data by easily generating a URL to publish content to a website or blog; automatically refresh files published to multiple locations to keep public data current.
• Local archiving – create archive copies of files that can be saved to a CD, DVD, NAS, USB drive or a second partition on a hard drive.
• Data migration – easily migrate files to a new PC.
• Multi-user dashboard – easily set up, manage and track the usage of employee accounts within a small business.

Mac users: don't get excited. There's no support for the Mac yet. On the other hand, there are other services, such as Mozy, which support the Mac. As an EMC company, you needn't worry about your data, either - at least long-term. After all, there's always the chance of an outage, as demonstrated by Amazon's S3 service, not that long ago.

The tech involved here was designed by Opelin, a company bought by HP last year.

For me, storage in the cloud isn't that attractive when I consider the asymmetric nature of my - and most people's - broadband. Give me FIOS service and we can talk. All that news about tiered pricing or throttling of heavy users doesn't do much for my confidence in these services either. I would imaging most people using this type of service would fit into the "heavy usage" category.

I mean, as some services and businesses want us to use more bandwidth, others want us to cut down on our use - or pay more for the privilege. And let's face it: when storing a file, storing on a LAN or storing on a network can't be beat by the "cloud." Of course, one fire, and there goes everything. Eventually I will likely move to the "cloud," but where's that FIOS when I want it?