The Cloud is purifying storage

Cloud storage companies are peeling away everything but the bytes

More learnings from the IDC Enterprise Disk Storage Consumption Model report: 

Since 2005, the Cloud’s share of storage capacity has grown from less than 5% to almost 20%.  Yet the Cloud’s share of storage revenue has risen to only about 5% in the same time period. 

How can “Content Depots”, as IDC calls them, build data centers for one fourth the cost (storage-wise) of conventional corporate data centers?

They use more high-capacity SATA drives, but that’s only part of the answer.  Rather than using off-the-shelf enterprise storage systems, they are often building their own storage system/server contraptions to strip away anything that doesn’t add value as a big bucket for internet bits.  

Granted, these systems aren’t going to support your everyday ERP system.  But these changes should be watched closely.  Innovation by these end-users will migrate back to the rest of the industry to give us all more bytes per buck. 

It already is – in many of the latest greatest storage upstarts’ products.