Cloud vendors respond to our request for information on the feasibility of storage services as an alternative to on-premises hardware.

By Jon William Toigo
InformationWeek
May 9, 2009 12:01 AM

Disk storage is already one of the data center's biggest expenses, the cost of finished arrays keeps rising, and IDC predicts that companies' storage infrastructures will grow 300% by the end of the decade. Amid this backdrop, there's growing concern that businesses will drown in the expense of storing data.
Enter cloud storage--network-accessible storage infrastructure that evangelists promise will prevent the apocalyptic scenario envisioned above by IDC in its "Exploding Data Universe" report (sponsored by EMC). Proffering largely untested claims about huge capacity cost reductions, the elimination of labor required for storage administration and maintenance, and just-in-time provisioning of capacity on a pennies-per-terabyte basis, cloud storage providers are getting the attention of businesses large and small.

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