The title of the afternoon’s first session, a panel discussion, was “Storage Opportunities: Cloud vs Conventional.” And while it implies there might be some either-or debate, but I’d imagine things are going to be more along the lines of looking at the nature of cloud storage, since the panel is made up of Sajai Krishnan of Parascale (a storage cloud software company), John Greaves of Carpathia Hosting (a hosting company that offers a cloud storage solution based on ParaScale), Steve Lesem of Mezeo Software (another cloud storage software), and Treb Ryan of OpSource (a SaaS infrastructure and service provider).

Lesem from Mezeo says he thinks a key distinction for cloud storage is API access, because, he thinks, if you’re accessing cloud storage without an API, then you’re using it the way storage used to be accessed.

One of the things Ryan brought up was the fact that when building a cloud solution, you have to consider the needs that cloud is intended to fill, if you want to build a solution that people will buy. Otherwise you may get caught up in the technology rather than the solution.

Krishnan says it’s important to think of the purpose you’ll put your cloud to, if you’re going to build a storage cloud. If you’re building something that’s an API-accessible file-based storage system, then you’re going to be competing with Amazon S3 and Google G-Drive, both of which are going to be impossible to beat from a price standpoint.

Ryan makes an interesting point about how one of the most under recognized aspect of Amazon’s success in cloud storage is the size of the business it has built based on almost no advertising. By building a product that was really easy to adopt, and building it with APIs, they created a channel, and a circumstance where many of the people using the S3 service are just using applications built on top of it, without knowing that S3 is what they’re using.

One of the basic circumstances of the storage model is that there is a ton of files that people need to store somehow right now. And that amount is only going to grow. And it’s going to grow fast. The people onstage all agreed that there’s a huge opportunity in providing a platform for this data to be stored.

Lesem says cloud storage is a business opportunity for cloud storage as a stand-alone offering, and as a component of a larger cloud computing offering.

A lot more was said, some of which addressed a kind of beneath-the-surface disagreement (though not a particularly unfriendly one) about the nature of how a cloud storage platform should be built. But overall, much more than I could keep up with. There's a lot to be learned about cloud storage, but there is an opportunity there for hosting providers.

Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with We... (Read full bio)

Comment by Anonymous on Wednesday, September 23, 2009

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