My Own Cloud

Patrick Rhone linked to an interesting post by a guy called Fraser Spiers titled “Be Your Own Cloud” all about how we are getting ever closer to the dream of data ubiquity, and connection to our own data.

In particular Fraser talks about how a couple of recent technological advances by Apple have brought us ever closer to the dream—Apple Remote Desktop, Back To My Mac, and and sleep proxies, as well as the hardware advances in the new iMacs.

The way I read what Fraser had to say, he wants to have a powerful machine sitting on his desk at home, and to be able to access that machine, and all its power, and data from anywhere he has a network connection. Whether that be on his iPhone, or from his MacBook Pro.

the key thing is that I never want to have to say “oh, I can’t do that thing here – it’ll have to wait until I get home”.

I have my own thoughts on creating my “own cloud” but I’m not sure I know how to articulate them. The benefit of my vision of the personal cloud is that its available and possible to do today. Without relying upon waiting for new technologies to be where they need to be to allow it.

I do know that it possible to build a server that sits in your garage at home, and runs pretty much any service you could possibly want – from file serving, to video streaming and most things in between.

There will be those that don’t want to go down this route, because its adding another machine to your already taxed network, and its having an impact on the environment. But just like the technologies mentioned earlier, there are hardware technologies that are improving all the time.

Solid state drives are getting closer and closer to being ready for mainstream all the time, and these not only provide performance benefits, but also have power benefits as well. In addition to that, the revolution that is going on right now in mobile computing will eventually result in innovation in low power consumption CPUs and motherboards.

Which brings us back to Fraser’s original post, and the fact that we aren’t there yet, but we’re not far off.