If Tom Lehrer could have an album called “Revisited” then there’s no reason why this blog can’t do the same thing with a piece by Carter George on cloud storage.
When we ran this post last May, cloud storage was an important topic of discussion. Since then, the blogo-tweet-o-sphere has exploded, with numerous posts per week on the subject, such as this one and this one.
Here’s an excerpt of what Carter had to say a little under a year ago about cloud storage. Still rings true, I’d say:
Most customers will still look at cost/Gigabyte as the main motivator to use a service like this and, at the right price and benefit point, people will put their files online. Since all these storage service providers all buy their disks from the same small number of companies that actually make disk drives, the costs are all roughly the same for the physical infrastructure needed to build an online storage service and compete.
I think that the real solution here is that, for anyone to breakthrough and get some separation from the crowd, they are going to have to incorporate breakthrough storage optimization in their offering – and do so in a way that’s transparent to the end user. That could be dedupe, that could be compression, or it could be something more sophisticated like Ocarina. The main thing is that if you can get 5:1 or 10:1 ratios on how much logical space you can provide via the cloud to how much physical space you, as a provider, have to buy, then you can have a compelling proposition. The competition is fierce in this market and in order to grow and thrive in any business that offers online storage, the providers are going to have to develop a strategy to significantly increase their online storage capacity without increasing cost and overhead in step.
