BYTE MARKS
Broadband bringing back virtual drives

By Burt Lum

Many of us who spend time building or supporting local area networks (LANs) are familiar with the concept of a virtual drive. Back in my day, when 3Com sold a network operating system called 3Plus and there was a thing called the DOS prompt, you could create virtual drives that existed on the network. It quickly demystified the idea of the virtual drive once you grasped the concept of a drive (the mysterious H: drive) existing on the LAN separate from your hard drive. Whereas the C: drive was normally your local drive, the H: drive was an arbitrary mapping for a drive on the network.

That was more than 15 years ago. 3Com is only a flicker of past glories. Local area networks still abound, but the biggest difference is the prevalence of broadband Internet access. With broadband Internet, the performance of the wide area approaches the speed of the local area. With that, resources such as the virtual drive become a reality. The concept is quite simple. Instead of storing files on your local hard drive, store those files across the Internet on storage arrays in a data center.

Oceanic RoadRunner, Honolulu's cable modem provider, is rolling out such a service. Go to webdrive.oceanic.com for more information. Imagine a file folder on your desktop. You can drag and drop files directly into this folder. It functions exactly like a normal folder but instead it is a virtual drive sitting on the Internet. You can store MP3s, photo images, documents, video files or any file format you desire. It is just another storage resource but accessible anywhere on the Net.

Although straightforward in concept, the Internet virtual drive required the work of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which created the proposed standard RFC 2518. The details are discussed at www.webdav.org.

This open standard introduces applications that are far-reaching. Some applications that come to mind include sharing files between work and home, within a small local area network of Macs and PCs, between friends or to collaborate with co-workers.

In a world of complexity, this is refreshingly simple. ;-)

Burt Lum is one click away at burt@brouhaha.net.