Howard Marks (DeepStorage.net) and I were on a GreyBeard's podcast last month (PB are the new TB) talking with the CTO (Brian Carmody [@initzero]) of hybrid storage vendor, Infinidat, who just happened to mention in passing that "our mobile devices pretty much act as caches for cloud data". That's interesting.
Mobile app's caching data
There's a part of me that couldn't agree more. Most of my mobile mail uses IMAP which acts as a browser for email residing elsewhere. Radio apps stream music from the cloud. Photo apps can store pictures on the cloud. Social media apps (Facebook, LinkedIN, Twitter, etc.) use the cloud to store posts/pokes/photos and only cache minimal data locally. There are many more apps that act similarly.
But not all data is cached
On the other hand, I have downloaded all of my music library to my mobile devices. There was a time when I was more selective but later generation devices have more than enough storage to hold it all.
Movies are another. Most purchased movies are download to my desktop. With only 64GBs of storage on my iPad/iPhone, I have to be a bit more judicious with which movies I store on the devices. Most of the time, when I am watching movies on mobile devices, I don't have Internet access, so caching/streaming won't work. Yet, for some services (Amazon Prime Video & Apple TV) I do stream at home and then the TV or AppleTV caches cloud media.
My photo library is similar, there's just too many photos to fit them all on the device. So for now, they reside on my desktop, only a select subset are copied to the device.
Contacts, passwords, calendars and countless other datums that reside on the cloud or my desktop computer are also replicated (not cached) on mobile devices. Could they be cached, probably, but with the need for these items, even when internet service is not available, caching them makes no sense.
Storage caching vs. mobile device caching
Storage caches are pretty sophisticated and Infinidat's as sophisticated as any of them. Historically, storage caching is resilient in the face of power outages, storage device failures, software bugs, etc. Essentially, when storage data hits the cache the storage system "guarantees" to write it to backend storage, some time in the future. Read data caching requires less resilience/fault tolerance because data already resides somewhere else on backend storage.
It's unclear whether mobile caching has similar strengths. As each app caches data in it's own way, there would be less resilience in mobile caching than storages subsystem caches. But I am no app developer, so don't have a clue as to what caching services are available within the mobile app ecosystem.
Device internet speed too slow
One thing that keeps me storing data on my mobile devices is the speed of Wi-Fi and cellular internet. It's often much slower than I would like. I suppose when these speed up there would be less need to save data on my mobile devices. But by that time, mobile storage will bemuch cheaper as well and I will have even more data to cache/store. So who knows.
Then again in the foreseeable future, there will be times without cellular or Wi-Fi Internet. So , storing data on the mobile device will always be the way to go at least for some data.
Maybe Brian's right
From my perspective, Brian is partially right about the mobile devices caching cloud data. But maybe it's just because I am old school that I decide to store a lot of data on my mobile devices.
From Brian's perspective, all that data is stored elsewhere (desktop or cloud). So it all could be cached and probably should be.
As the world rolls out IoT, with even less storage at the edge, caching cloud data will become even more of a necessity. Hopefully by then Internet access will become even more universal than it is already.
Comments?
Photo Credits: Blake Patterson, iPhone apps sphere
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