Cloud Storage Meets the Hype

There has been a tremendous amount of hype around everything “cloud”, and anything that might be called “cloud”, in the past 12 months.

So when Network World writes a story headlined ‘Cloud Storage Lives Up to the Hype’, that’s saying a lot!

According to Network World, cloud storage can really be cheaper than your current solutions while delivering high performance.

Not surprisingly, they also found that cloud storage — and cloud services in general — offers more complexity than one might expect, and approaches to calculating the full cost of ownership are not necessarily obvious, as this chart from the article illustrates:

The article covered several services, including Amazon’s S3, Nirvanix, Rackspace, Egnyte, and Nasuni.

There is also a number of early and expansion stage software companies out there that are not covered in the article that should help cloud storage become much more widespread.

For example, Mezeo enables service providers to offer their own cloud storage service, and Twinstrata helps enterprises derive faster performance and better integration from their cloud storage service providers.

Based on Network World’s findings, senior management teams grappling with storage costs should look to the cloud, and expansion stage software companies selling cloud computing software should look to partner and integrate with cloud storage providers.