Google Docs now has a batch export facility for their documents created by the Data Liberation Front, a Google team setup to help customers leave.

“Imagine you want to move out of your apartment. When you ask your landlord about the terms of your previous lease, he says that you are free to leave at any time; however, you cannot take all of your things with you – not your photos, your keepsakes, or your clothing. If you’re like most people, a restriction like this may cause you to rethink moving altogether. Not only is this a bad situation for you as the tenant, but it’s also detrimental to the housing industry as a whole, which no longer has incentive to build better apartments at all.”

Frankly the likelihood of me adopting Google Apps has just rocketed and my respect for Google as an organisation has gone through the roof. However, the idea isn’t new. In off the page advertising and mail order being able to return the goods for a full refund has been proven to increase order rates markedly.

Now for the cloud, the vendor supplied tools that we have for leaving one hypervisor tenancy and moving to another are either non existent or painfully manual. I think we need some more open thinking here so that we can work between public and private clouds transparently and migrate in and out at will.

So last week when I met with Ian Masters, the UK Sales and Marketing Director for Double-Take Software at Storage Expo I liked what I saw. Double-Take have a neat product called Double-Take Move that enables IT Operators to move workload between platforms transparently and in real time. Right now it works on Windows platforms and enables workload to move between physical servers, and into and out of Xen Server, VMware and Hyper-V transparently.

It’s exactly what we need in the significant number of environments that have to support multiple hypervisors.