Xbox clould storage being rolled out now!!

calex71

I didn't get the update yet, but have to say once it's fully up and running it will be of great benefit to me as I play between 2 xboxs in 2 different places.

Only working with arcade titles at the moment too, not sure which ones either

No more worrying about forgetting my USB stick

http://blog.gadgethelpline.com/xbox-360-users-cloud-storage-access/

amacachi

Sorry for being a little off-topic but all this "cloud" crap I've been hearing for the last year, am I right in thinking it just means "on a server somewhere that you can access from anywhere"?

calex71

amacachi wrote: »

Sorry for being a little off-topic but all this "cloud" crap I've been hearing for the last year, am I right in thinking it just means "on a server somewhere that you can access from anywhere"?

Get with the times, the "cloud" is where all the cool kids are

But yeah it's a server farm somewhere, same principle if you use an andriod phone it syncs all your contacts to google servers and if you change phone or something oyu can pull down all your calendar data and contacts and email etc only here it will be your game saves and profile data.

amacachi

calex71 wrote: »

Get with the times, the "cloud" is where all the cool kids are

But yeah it's a server farm somewhere, same principle if you use an andriod phone it syncs all your contacts to google servers and if you change phone or something oyu can pull down all your calendar data and contacts and email etc only here it will be your game saves and profile data.

So it basically does what any half-wit could do 15 years ago with access to a server? Assumed from how many companies were pushing it that it had to be an application of a very simple technology. :pac:

calex71

Yeah it's a buzz word lately , and imo useless for heavy duty application here to the average recession effected joe/jo , like the Google Music thing that allows you to upload all your music and access from the cloud. Most isp's here are offering piss poor upload speeds and data costs per kb on mobile operators (even on a data plan) are extortionate.

But for xbox it has it's uses for me personally.

amacachi

calex71 wrote: »

Yeah it's a buzz word lately , and imo useless for heavy duty application here to the average recession effected joe/jo , like the Google Music thing that allows you to upload all your music and access from the cloud. Most isp's here are offering piss poor upload speeds and data costs per kb on mobile operators (even on a data plan) are extortionate.

But for xbox it has it's uses for me personally.

Ah yeah, it's just that with all the marketing I was thinking "surely they don't just mean online back-ups". :pac:

It will be handy alright and will save me getting tonnes of achievements for my friends while I get fcuk all. :pac: Also it's something that should've been around before now.

Bandana boy

its not just an "online back up"
It will have all your information easily accesible from any machine at any time

It will also have your processing power not linked to the machine you are accessing from -in the future this could mean substantially increased proccessing power per individual as you utilise the power of the cloud

-=al=-

Good idea, saves transfering data

would have been nice if this was released before they released the new xbox to trasnfer shizzle across!

Captain Chaos

Already existed for Gamer Card data since the Xbox was launched. You can download your gamer card from Live to any 360 but will only be active on one console at a time. Anyone can download your gamer card once they know your gamertag and password.

Once you have your gamer card data you can download anything again on a new 360 so I don't see the point of this unless it's for save game data, then that would be something.

cython

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Already existed for Gamer Card data since the Xbox was launched. You can download your gamer card from Live to any 360 but will only be active on one console at a time. Anyone can download your gamer card once they know your gamertag and password.

Once you have your gamer card data you can download anything again on a new 360 so I don't see the point of this unless it's for save game data, then that would be something.

Linked Article Above wrote:

Save data can also be accessed, though at present it has been reported that this only works for certain Xbox Live Arcade games. Users will also have access to their friends list, game achievements and Microsoft Points.

Microsoft announced the new Cloud storage service back at the massive E3 games event in Los Angeles last month. “We are making it easier for you to sign into your Xbox Live account from any console at any time to access your game saves and full profile,” said Live exec Marc Whitten.

“Cloud storage will allow you to enjoy the same great Xbox Live gaming experience even when you’re not in your own living room by giving you the option to store your ‘game saves’ securely in the Xbox Live cloud, instead of on a portable memory unit or your console’s hard drive.

So it is in fact something....

One thing that I would like to clarify is what I have underlined above. Is it a mutually exclusive decision between cloud storage and local storage, or will there be a mechanic whereby you can save locally, with changes being replicated to the cloud? If the former, then I can see this being a pain in the ass for anyone whose connection may not be ideal, or in the case that there is a service outage it could render their saves completely inaccessible. If the latter, then truly awesome!

Healium

Captain Chaos wrote: »

Already existed for Gamer Card data since the Xbox was launched. You can download your gamer card from Live to any 360 but will only be active on one console at a time. Anyone can download your gamer card once they know your gamertag and password.

The whole point is that you won't have to do this anymore. Soon, you'll be able to sign in on any console, and have your Gamerscore, MS points, saves etc. with you, without any need for a memory stick or GT recovery

calex71

The gamertag recovery process at the minute is painfully slow.

corcaigh07

is LIVE down at the moment, im having problems connecting...

LaVail

corcaigh07 wrote: »

is LIVE down at the moment, im having problems connecting...

down for everyone I think

http://support.xbox.com/en-gb/pages/xbox-live/xbox-live-status.aspx

hightower1

Cloud computing is nothing new, we have been doing ot for years and years and years now. Whenever you access content that you saved that wasnt on local storage.... thats "cloud" computing. Its just a bloody buzz word latched on to by marketeers to make the dullards think its something new (looking directly at you apple)

Flickr, facebook, dropbox all cloud computing or as it used to be called online back ups!

This malarky of "it could massivly increase your processing performance" is total BS. It will have no interaction in any wa at all with the processing power of your machine (s). It will simply allow you to store content elsewhere other than your hard drive and ANY techie worth his salt knows that processing speed is everything to do with your RAM /processor and NOT your hard drive.

hightower1

Bandana boy wrote: »

It will also have your processing power not linked to the machine you are accessing from -in the future this could mean substantially increased proccessing power per individual as you utilise the power of the cloud

You actually couldnt be more wrong if you tried.
See my above post with processing power having nothing to do with cloud computing.

The ONLY time cloud computing will increase processing power is when you link huge amount of balde servers with massive floating point data power to serve as one big processor for one terminal. Clud computing commonly taslked of here is not this in any way , it IS back up for contet and NOT floating point data calculation / processing power.

What your saying essentially is "I have upgraded my hard drive from 250gb to 500gb now my computer will run faster"... facepalm.

Fingleberries

Healium wrote: »

The whole point is that you won't have to do this anymore. Soon, you'll be able to sign in on any console, and have your Gamerscore, MS points, saves etc. with you, without any need for a memory stick or GT recovery

It'll be very handy because if you have two xboxes in the one house, or head around to a mates you just sign in with your ID and everything is there (Gamerscore, achievements, Avatar, etc.). Rather than the current method of recovering your gamertag (long process) when you change machines only to recover it again when you switch back to the other machine. And no need to keep your profile on a USB Key, either.

The only downside to game saves is if you're at an offline machine, then you won't have access to this stuff (back to using USB Key again).

It also won't be useful for transferring data (such as Arcade Games, etc).

For the earlier question about general 'cloud' shenanigans, it is pretty much the stuff that you could do with a server ages ago but on a much bigger scale. Just compare Hotmail or Gmail with the web mail you would have used ten or fifteen years ago, or look at Google Apps (or Office Web Apps) as an example of where it will go - sure they're not as full-featured as the Desktop Applications yet, but for something that just needs a browser and a user account to run, they're pretty neat. Amazon's EC2 cloud service is good, too - you can 'rent' a server to do storage, or processing, or whatever you like really (unless it's run WikiLeaks from it, they didn't like that) - it's a quick and easy way to get an online service up and running without the hassle of managing the Data Centre yourself. Another take on the cloud is what Google is trying to start with it's Chromebooks.

Overall, I don't see there being much different to the XBox experience, unless you move around between machines a lot. Really if you look at it, XBox Live has always been a cloud service - this is just a fairly nice new feature, and marketing to be with the 'on-trend' techie topic of cloud computing.

D3UC3 J3

Cloud is the way to go.

It only accesses the info it needs at any point in time and frees up the XBox 360 to work on making the game run better and faster etc.

Also the long time to recover your Gamer Tag is because recovering you GT means downloading all of your achievements, DLC content keys, preferences etc etc.

So the more games you play the bigger your (and longer) the recovery will take.

I have 45Kish of achievements so it would take forever.

Completely pointless for someone like me to keep DLing a GT every time I want to move console.

Fingleberries

Just thinking about this, the question comes to mind of how fast can it upload your save data 'to the cloud' - I'm thinking of Checkpoints and AutoSaves within the game. Are you likely to see a blip while it tries to write and upload this data to the cloud?

justsomebloke

hightower1 wrote: »

You actually couldnt be more wrong if you tried.
See my above post with processing power having nothing to do with cloud computing.

actually he's not, once you are talking about cloud computing you can talk about anything that is currently available to customers via cloud computing. The perfect example of this is onlive! which is doing exactly what he was talking about, and in truth is probably the future of consoling

Mr Bloat

Fingleberries wrote: »

Just thinking about this, the question comes to mind of how fast can it upload your save data 'to the cloud' - I'm thinking of Checkpoints and AutoSaves within the game. Are you likely to see a blip while it tries to write and upload this data to the cloud?

I don't think it uploads your game saves, just your profile as in your gamertag, achievements, etc. I would think that it syncs once a day, most likely when you turn on the console and it logs you into XBL.

Mr Bloat

Joe the Santa wrote: »

actually he's not, once you are talking about cloud computing you can talk about anything that is currently available to customers via cloud computing. The perfect example of this is onlive! which is doing exactly what he was talking about, and in truth is probably the future of consoling

That's cloud computing, which is a completely different product than cloud storage, which is what is on offer here.

hightower1

D3UC3 J3 wrote: »

Cloud is the way to go.

It only accesses the info it needs at any point in time and frees up the XBox 360 to work on making the game run better and faster etc.

I think your not quite getting how this works? The xbox cpu used very little of its power in saving data, even the game saves use very very little space in the hard drive. Saving a game every second of the run time will have nearly no bearning on perfromance.

Using a cloud based saving system will NOT help performance in any way, it will simply give convenience of moving from xbox to xbox and thats all.


In terms of "cloud being the only way to go"??? If you consider the limitations of cloud computing then you wouldnt say that.
As I outlined having your comp save to a hard drive or a cloud will not make it run faster in any way the only effect it will have is it will allow you to ether make a comp with smaller hard drives (bringing costs down) or alllow the user to not save to their local drive. The down sides through are massive. If your on a portable device like a netbook on 3g and you have all your docs saved to a cloud and need to upload / download from there on 3g you will soon see how fustrating cloud based computing is as your waiting donkies for simple docs to uplaoid download EVERY time you want something that would normally be in your hard drve and used to be instanly accessable. You will also run into your ISP cap very quickly based on the fact that your going to be uploading / downloading a lot.

Until bb speeds , transfer rates , coverage and caps increase cloud computing is most definitly NOT the way to go. When all these things increase then perhaps it will be welcome as hardware prices can be slashed but thats it.

D3UC3 J3

Whoa! Stop for a breath...

hightower1 wrote: »

I think your not quite getting how this works? The xbox cpu used very little of its power in saving data, even the game saves use very very little space in the hard drive. Saving a game every second of the run time will have nearly no bearning on perfromance.

Using a cloud based saving system will NOT help performance in any way, it will simply give convenience of moving from xbox to xbox and thats all.


In terms of "cloud being the only way to go"??? If you consider the limitations of cloud computing then you wouldnt say that.
... ... ... abridged...

I know exactly how this works. I'm not talking about "cloud computing".

See the thread title "Cloud Storage" - (in the Xbox 360 forum btw)

I see your point on Cloud Computing though, all valid might I add.

Cloud storage on xbox 360 wise though - I think the xbox will have less to do if it doesn't have to send information stored on my HDD to an Xbox Live server to verify my account details achievements etc and then send it back to my HDD.

Storing the game info on the same xbox live server that is accessing it and using my XBox 360 as a dummy terminal surely must be quicker in some respect?

Surely the amount of trips the data has to do will decrease?

Also, I don't know if you miss quoted me - "cloud being the only way to go"???... I said "Cloud is the way to go" either way I'll agree to disagree.

Lastly we're talking about Xbox 360 here...what's with the rant about 3G, netbooks, docs, BB speeds, ISP caps etc???

bobbytables

I saw this thread earlier but didn't have time to reply. The concept of the cloud seems to be causing a lot of people a lot of bother.

I work with cloud computing, storage, etc etc, quite a bit with work so let me shed some light on the subject. The contemporary cloud as we've all been hearing about through the media, etc, is not the same as the more traditional concept of "a server". The cloud is a virtual abstraction on top of a scalable base of physical resources (servers, networks, storage devices, etc). Anyone who says it's just a marketing concept is incorrect. A cloud is a fantastic application of virtualization technology.

What differs this from years back when we all used servers to say host games of quakeworld or host files, etc is that each server had a resource limit. Vertical scaling was easy, but again the limit was never far away, and horizontal scaling was not always easy and still kept us tied to the notion of physical. So then advancements in virtualization technology brought us to a place where the concept of a "resource" wasn't tied to a single physical device.

So in the context of say your XBox where you have some storage in the cloud it means that the actual physical resources that you consume are not exclusively attached to a single machine or server. They could be scattered all over the place, but form my or your perspective it would appears like a traditional setup.

So when you're thinking about "the cloud", think of it as a potentially unlimited resource, and not in terms of physical machines.

-=al=-

hightower1 wrote: »

Cloud computing is nothing new, we have been doing ot for years and years and years now. Whenever you access content that you saved that wasnt on local storage.... thats "cloud" computing. Its just a bloody buzz word latched on to by marketeers to make the dullards think its something new (looking directly at you apple)

Flickr, facebook, dropbox all cloud computing or as it used to be called online back ups!

This malarky of "it could massivly increase your processing performance" is total BS. It will have no interaction in any wa at all with the processing power of your machine (s). It will simply allow you to store content elsewhere other than your hard drive and ANY techie worth his salt knows that processing speed is everything to do with your RAM /processor and NOT your hard drive.

I eh, concur -

calex71

bobbytables wrote: »

I saw this thread earlier but didn't have time to reply. The concept of the cloud seems to be causing a lot of people a lot of bother.

I work with cloud computing, storage, etc etc, quite a bit with work so let me shed some light on the subject. The contemporary cloud as we've all been hearing about through the media, etc, is not the same as the more traditional concept of "a server". The cloud is a virtual abstraction on top of a scalable base of physical resources (servers, networks, storage devices, etc). Anyone who says it's just a marketing concept is incorrect. A cloud is a fantastic application of virtualization technology.

What differs this from years back when we all used servers to say host games of quakeworld or host files, etc is that each server had a resource limit. Vertical scaling was easy, but again the limit was never far away, and horizontal scaling was not always easy and still kept us tied to the notion of physical. So then advancements in virtualization technology brought us to a place where the concept of a "resource" wasn't tied to a single physical device.

So in the context of say your XBox where you have some storage in the cloud it means that the actual physical resources that you consume are not exclusively attached to a single machine or server. They could be scattered all over the place, but form my or your perspective it would appears like a traditional setup.

So when you're thinking about "the cloud", think of it as a potentially unlimited resource, and not in terms of physical machines.

As I expressed my annoyance at earlier the limiting factor for it's implementation for users here (cloud in general) being bandwidth and the cost of data over mobile connections :mad:

That's a problem with ISP's and mobile operators and not with cloud technologies though. There was actually a snippet on the news earlier on RTE I only half heard where one guy said €7 per 1mb while roaming :eek:

IMO that is crippling the uptake of cloud services where they are of most usefulness.

/Rant over

justsomebloke

Mr Bloat wrote: »

That's cloud computing, which is a completely different product than cloud storage, which is what is on offer here.

eh, did you actually read the quote in my post! The one that referenced cloud computing and not cloud storage.

hightower1

bobbytables wrote: »

So when you're thinking about "the cloud", think of it as a potentially unlimited resource, and not in terms of physical machines.

So what company are you working for thats allowing this unlimited source resource in terms of storage?! lmao. I will definitly sign up for that but I dont think a company offering such a service will last very long ...... or are you just putting a marketing spin on what is by its definition NOT an unlimited resource? Its very much limited in terms of technical aspects such as data saved will need to take up a finite amount of space and other technical aspects such as its utter reliance on ISP specs.

This is nothing new and we all know it tbh.

We have all been using remote saved data for years and it was in a lot of cases not saved on only one server somewhere (as you seem to belive this is the defining point of the "old cloud computing set up"). When you were accessing your bungie.net account ages ago do you really think all the details for every user was saved to one server somewhere or multiple. Of coarse there were multiple servers for this (redundency, geographical location access accross the web to counteract latency, and sheer volume of data storage needed) So this null and voids your idea that the recent emmergence of cloud computing is totally different to the already established use becuase your details are accessed through and account that links to multiple physical servers in differing locations... thats EXACTLY what we were doing with multiple other services just like bungie.net.


"New" cloud computing = Accessing an online account from anywhere / pulling down data that is stored on multiple locations accross the globe.

BS, plain and simple. We have always been doing this. Think ofany large online account you have had in the last 10 years that you stored any type of data on.... I'll give another example. Youtube. They clearly have server locations accross the planet but yet you access your youtube account from anywhere and can use that media at any terminal and youtube pulls the data stored in differnt locations to bring it to that terminat that your on.

Simply becuase iTunes says something is "new" doesnt make it so, all it is is a new name for a way of using tech that we have been using for decades now.

hightower1

D3UC3 J3 wrote: »

Storing the game info on the same xbox live server that is accessing it and using my XBox 360 as a dummy terminal surely must be quicker in some respect?

Not at all, in fact it would probably use more processing power for the xbox to open a network connection while running a game, connect to your account and upload save data to a server as oposed to simply writing data to the HDD. It wont have any noticable effect even though technically the process wil be slower.

Think of it in terms of how long does it take to upload / save a pic to an online account as opposed to save one to your comps hard drive? And there ya go, its considerably longer to do the former but as I said it will not make any noticable diff to the performance of the xbox.

The reason MS are doing this is not for performance but for the ability to access details from any xbox.

Bandana boy

hightower1 wrote: »

You actually couldnt be more wrong if you tried.
See my above post with processing power having nothing to do with cloud computing.

The ONLY time cloud computing will increase processing power is when you link huge amount of balde servers with massive floating point data power to serve as one big processor for one terminal. Clud computing commonly taslked of here is not this in any way , it IS back up for contet and NOT floating point data calculation / processing power.

What your saying essentially is "I have upgraded my hard drive from 250gb to 500gb now my computer will run faster"... facepalm.

I am not saying that

The posts above mine had a question is the "cloud" i keep hearing about just online storage
A poster said that was correct
And I said it was not correct the cloud will eventually be a lot more than just storage and will eventually be your proccesing power

If that was not clear ....mea culpa

justsomebloke

hightower1 wrote: »

"New" cloud computing = Accessing an online account from anywhere / pulling down data that is stored on multiple locations accross the globe.

BS, plain and simple. We have always been doing this. Think ofany large online account you have had in the last 10 years that you stored any type of data on.... I'll give another example. Youtube.
.

Hotmail turned 15 years old yesterday, which is older then some of the posters on this forum

theblueeyz

Joe the Santa wrote: »

Hotmail turned 15 years old yesterday, which is older then some of the posters on this forum

It's unfortunate I can't thank yet, so +1 will suffice.

-=al=-

Joe the Santa wrote: »

Hotmail turned 15 years old yesterday, which is older then some of the posters on this forum

Pity it's still pants

Ah I used hotmail for yonks and yonks, still use my 11 year old email for msn... loved the old msn, pity that was ruined a few years back... think it went all windows live-y after version 7.5 ...apple using this cloud nonsense recently is just annoying

/a bit random :pac:

bobbytables

hightower1 wrote: »

So what company are you working for thats allowing this unlimited source resource in terms of storage?! lmao. I will definitly sign up for that but I dont think a company offering such a service will last very long

Jesus relax buddy LOL, you are entitled to your beliefs & if you're content with your understanding of cloud technologies then good for you. I'd love to know what sort of background you have in all of this that makes you so "confident".

Actually no ****it...

Where in my previous post did I say my company provided unlimited cloud services?. If you read it again I said I work with cloud technologies in work. I also said "potentially unlimited", because the resources available to a cloud can be extended by simply adding more physical resources resulting in a larger single entity. What's the max number of physical resources that could be added to a single cloud, oh sure it just so happens to be potentially infinite. Also "back in the day" when we were apparently calling the cloud something else, I'd love you to describe in detail how software was creating variable infrastructures on the fly without human intervention?.

How do I know these things, I'm a software developer that once developed software that ran on server farms (even on PVMs), but more recently software that can dynamically spawn/scale infrastructures as required thanks to all the efforts that made this level of abstraction (which we call the cloud) possible. What makes me different from you is that I appreciate it first hand from the perspective of a developer first and user second. I am looking forward to hearing what qualifies you to tell me I'm spouting BS, because some of that code I wrote over the past few years that takes advantage of innovations in virtualisation and the cloud must be pretty ****ing redundant.

So I tell you what, stop being so ****ing arrogant and attacking others on this thread just because your understanding of the subject is different. The intention of my previous post was to be helpful, not simply to disagree with you for the sake of it.

amacachi

bobbytables wrote: »

I saw this thread earlier but didn't have time to reply. The concept of the cloud seems to be causing a lot of people a lot of bother.

I work with cloud computing, storage, etc etc, quite a bit with work so let me shed some light on the subject. The contemporary cloud as we've all been hearing about through the media, etc, is not the same as the more traditional concept of "a server". The cloud is a virtual abstraction on top of a scalable base of physical resources (servers, networks, storage devices, etc). Anyone who says it's just a marketing concept is incorrect. A cloud is a fantastic application of virtualization technology.

What differs this from years back when we all used servers to say host games of quakeworld or host files, etc is that each server had a resource limit. Vertical scaling was easy, but again the limit was never far away, and horizontal scaling was not always easy and still kept us tied to the notion of physical. So then advancements in virtualization technology brought us to a place where the concept of a "resource" wasn't tied to a single physical device.

So in the context of say your XBox where you have some storage in the cloud it means that the actual physical resources that you consume are not exclusively attached to a single machine or server. They could be scattered all over the place, but form my or your perspective it would appears like a traditional setup.

So when you're thinking about "the cloud", think of it as a potentially unlimited resource, and not in terms of physical machines.

I don't suppose you have an MBA by any chance?

bobbytables

amacachi wrote: »

I don't suppose you have an MBA by any chance?

Afraid not. My degrees, most of my qualifications & my years of experience are are all in IT/Engineering. Before I got in to service oriented stuff I too considered this "cloud" stuff hype. I was wrong.

amacachi

Without "vertical" and "horizontal" buzzwords etc. what's so great about cloud storage over just calling it "on a server somewhere" other than the built-in redundancy and therefore scalability? You can talk about abstractions all you want but all I can see is that it's on a server and I (don't need to know where) can't be told what server as such.

bobbytables

Ok so let's just take storage as a type of resource. Let's say a cloud has (n) physical storage devices connected via a network, each of variable size. Through code I can create a new virtual hard drive of a capacity that I can define on the fly that allocates sufficient resources from the cloud for this purpose. The benefit here is that i don't care that it's virtual and that I don't need to pay for more than I need.

Have a look at IaaS and what the likes of AWS have done in this regard. Yes down the stack it's a collection of physical devices just like years ago, but an ability to create a hard drive like a object in code is a powerful feat and very useful. I say this as someone who worked in situations where this was simply not possible and we had to rely on admins to provision the infrastructure that could serve foreseeable demands. Both expensive & time consuming it was.

amacachi

So will MS be renting cloud space off someone else or have they their own huge amounts of servers sitting idle until they fill up?

While there's plenty of optimization and all that happening the amount of space taken up is the same, the bandwidth is the same (if not higher on the server side) and the only benefit is that it's renting from someone else which would amaze me if MS needed to do that.

bobbytables

To be fair MS is a cloud provider itself. The benefits of cloud technology is what clients of such companies pay for. I've worked with Amazon's cloud services at both user and developer levels and as I said before if I wanted to write some code that could spin up or down some variable resource capacity based on some conditional event I can. I don't need to get on the phone to a human or even be aware what my code is requesting (within reason) if I wanted. At the end of the day the cloud let's me treat hardware resources like software components available to my applications.

This is not the same as "I have files on the Internet and I don't need to be concerned with where". We always had location transparency with distributed architectures & redundancy, we don't need virtualization or the cloud to have that. However cloud technology has inherited these things because the virtualization of resources spans distributed physical tiers.

Slippin Jimmy

So has anyone got their update?

naughto

nope

cython

Duffff-Man wrote: »

So has anyone got their update?

Don't think we'll be getting it so soon after all: http://www.tgdaily.com/games-and-entertainment-brief/57088-microsoft-denies-xbox-live-cloud-rumors

Microsoft is denying speculation that its promised cloud storage service for Xbox Live has been rolled out ahead of schedule.

As part of the myriad new features announced at its E3 keynote last month, Microsoft said it will be giving Xbox 360 users the ability to upload some of their user content - which to date has needed to be stored on a local console - to the cloud.

Specifically, users will be able to store their Gamertags to an online account, and then retrieve them from any other Xbox 360 system.

The service will also allow storing save files for certain games to the cloud, eliminating the dreaded fear of losing progress and having to start a game all over again.

Earlier this week, buzz started spreading that Microsoft was already beginning the phase of rolling out the cloud services, prompting Xbox gamers to check for updates and hunt for the new feature.

However, Joystiq quoted a Microsoft spokesperson as quashing the rumors, saying, "Just confirmed that the service has not gone live yet. We'll keep you posted on launch details."

Microsoft isn't really pioneering anything here, as Sony has offered online-based account retrieval for the PS3 from day one, and introduced cloud-based game saves when it rolled out Playstation Plus last year.

Among the other new features planned for Xbox Live this year are indeed new and exciting industry changers, like the ability to watch live TV from an Xbox 360 console. A huge update for Xbox Live is currently slated for a general fall 2011 time frame.

Underpaid Mike

hightower1 wrote: »

So what company are you working for thats allowing this unlimited source resource in terms of storage?! lmao. I will definitly sign up for that but I dont think a company offering such a service will last very long ...... or are you just putting a marketing spin on what is by its definition NOT an unlimited resource? Its very much limited in terms of technical aspects such as data saved will need to take up a finite amount of space and other technical aspects such as its utter reliance on ISP specs.

This is nothing new and we all know it tbh.

We have all been using remote saved data for years and it was in a lot of cases not saved on only one server somewhere (as you seem to belive this is the defining point of the "old cloud computing set up"). When you were accessing your bungie.net account ages ago do you really think all the details for every user was saved to one server somewhere or multiple. Of coarse there were multiple servers for this (redundency, geographical location access accross the web to counteract latency, and sheer volume of data storage needed) So this null and voids your idea that the recent emmergence of cloud computing is totally different to the already established use becuase your details are accessed through and account that links to multiple physical servers in differing locations... thats EXACTLY what we were doing with multiple other services just like bungie.net.


"New" cloud computing = Accessing an online account from anywhere / pulling down data that is stored on multiple locations accross the globe.

BS, plain and simple. We have always been doing this. Think ofany large online account you have had in the last 10 years that you stored any type of data on.... I'll give another example. Youtube. They clearly have server locations accross the planet but yet you access your youtube account from anywhere and can use that media at any terminal and youtube pulls the data stored in differnt locations to bring it to that terminat that your on.

Simply becuase iTunes says something is "new" doesnt make it so, all it is is a new name for a way of using tech that we have been using for decades now.

I find it pretty scary that you can write on this topic with such authority yet it is very obvious that you do not understand the concept or the technology. Cloud storage/computing and using servers are most certainly not the same thing. You should read bobbytables posts again.

The simpliest way to specify the difference i have found is as follows (from wikipedia) :

The key characteristic of cloud computing is that the computing is "in the cloud"; that is, the processing (and the related data) is not in a specified, known or static place(s). This is in contrast to a model in which the processing takes place in one or more specific servers that are known.

If you want to argue cloud storage versus server storage simply replace storage for computing in the above quote.

unklerosco

amacachi wrote: »

So will MS be renting cloud space off someone else or have they their own huge amounts of servers sitting idle until they fill up?

They've just finished building a rather large place out near Clondalkin that as far as I know is being used for cloud storage... Been building it for near 4 years now, afaik it was finished late last year....

Gunther_Gloop

Cloud computing and cloud storage allows the relevant companies to rent their products, ensuring predictable and consistent revenue streams. It also gives them more control and power over what their "users" can do and see and use them for.

I don't mean to turn this into conspiracy theory stuff, but I have no enthusiasm for abdicating my central processing and storage abilities to anywhere other than the box that is next to me.

Trevor451

About time Steam have been doing this for a while now and its really handy