One that seems like a useful cheat sheet is OnlineStorage.org. This site has a number of useful links and reviews of seven major cloud storage players in the consumer space. The detailed review of each offering provides the pros and cons of the various options. Check out a sample: online storage review for ElephantDrive.

The report is titled “Prepare for Object Storage in the Enterprise and it defines object storage as “Storage of data that is broken into distinct segments, each containing a unique identifier that allows for retrieval and integrity verification of the data.”

From Dave Raffo at Tech Target:

The report isn’t anti-object storage. It points out object storage systems’ value in the areas of massive scalability, greater custom control over data, the ability to reduce management and hardware costs, and its WORM and shared tenancy features. It also recommends object storage for certain workloads. But it also looks at the downsides that need to be considered before adopting an object storage system.

For more, see the full article.

More insights from the report…

Including the large and well-established software-as-a-service (SaaS) category, cloud computing will grow from revenue of $8.7bn in 2010 to $16.7bn in 2013, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24%.

The core cloud computing market will grow at much more rapid pace as the cloud increasingly becomes a mainstream IT strategy embraced by corporate enterprises and government agencies. Excluding SaaS revenue, cloud-delivered platform and infrastructure services will grow from $964m in revenue in 2010 to $3.9bn 2013 – a CAGR of 60% – the report said. The core market includes platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings, as well as the cloud-delivered software used to build and manage a cloud environment, which The 451 Group calls ‘software infrastructure as a service’ (SIaaS).

Since storage itself is rapidly becoming a commodity (courtesy of bulk providers like Amazon S3, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure, and Google), the features, performance, and price of services is where end users will have to make their choices. And the trade offs of are real and interesting. A recent article captured this well comparing the services at Mozy and ElephantDrive. The author breaks down the relative strengths and finds that Mozy costs less but ElephantDrive offers more value. The take aways are pretty clear – if you are looking for the lowest priced option you go one way, but if you are looking for the most functionality or the fastest performance you go another. Our read is that as a home user with lots of data, you should consider the Mozy option but if you are running a small business or operating as a “power user” (and have an understanding of your actual data footprint) you will want to choose ElephantDrive.

This same question will be addressed within the other verticals and we are looking forward to the continued maturing of the competitors.

In the meantime, we think the guys at NETGEAR (formerly Infrant) nailed the idea in this video (warning: this video contains a giant animated reptile) for the ReadyNAS Vault:

These are some of the companies or products we think fit the bill: Nasuni Filer, Ctera Cloud Plus , NETGEAR ReadyNAS Vault, Nirvanix CloudNAS, JungleDisk Map Drive, ElephantDrive Map Drive. Who are we missing?

The new service is called RRS, for Reduced Redundancy Storage. Instead of the ultra-reliable storage offering that comes standard with S3 (an astounding 99.99999999% of reliability, though only 99.9% of availability), RRS promises 99.99% reliability. In this sense, reliability means durability and integrity (that the object will be intact in the exact form that you put it there originally). Amazon CTO Werner Vogels posted on the topic yesterday. Why would you ever want this? Price.

RRS starts off 33% cheaper than normal S3, making it much more attractive if you don’t need to the extreme levels of reliability. This could make Amazon storage a real option for a whole new class of data.

Microsoft Launches Windows Azure Drive – previously (and suspiciously) code-named “Xdrive,” Microsoft has pushed an NTFS-formatted virtual hard drive service into a wider CTP.  According to Windows Azure Storage Architect Brad Calder, users will be able to run applications in the cloud…

Carbonite Reaches Out to Small Business – The consumer online backup tool finally unwraps a long awaited business program, Carbonite Pro, offering backup storage at $0.50 per GB per month.  The storage pricing matches the MozyPro offer, but the Boston-based firm has upped the ante by removing per device licensing fees.

Zumodrive and HP Link Up for CloudDrive – Following the Upline debacle, HP has dipped its toe back in the cloud storage water by offering the CloudDrive service on netbooks, powered by tiny Zumodrive.  The aforementioned platform has been lauded for their unique approach to desktop integration, and the ease of use in accessing the cloud via native applications, such as iTunes.  Expect the other OEMs to quickly follow suit.  iPadDrive, anyone?

Box.net Offers Cloud-based Content Management – Along with the exposure of an online document viewer, Box.net now claims an edge over Microsoft Sharepoint.

The announcement comes despite an overall decline in traffic to Dropbox’s sites in December according to Compete (in November 2009 the company acquired dropbox.com and discontinued the use of getdropbox.com).  Interestingly, Compete reports only 2.3 million unique visitors since September; adding 2 million registrants in that time would indicate either 1) errors in Compete’s measurements, so extreme as to be toxic, 2) massive growth coming from iPhone or other peripheral sources, 3) a conversion rate so incredible it has never before been seen on the web.

Dropbox users are given 2 GB of storage for free, 50 GB for $9.95, or 100 GB for $99.95.  Both paid tiers, at $0.20 per GB per month, closely mirror the $0.15 per GBM storage cost of Amazon S3, which the company uses as its storage backend.  Loading transfer and request costs, margins for paying users are even slimmer.  Presumably the company is betting on both paid and free users using far less capacity than their plans allow or gaining economies of scale from Amazon (who drops storage pricing as much as 75% at higher tiers of storage).  Storing 2GB for 4 million users equals 8 petabytes, which would cost roughly $600K per month for storage alone.  The company previously raised $7.2 million from Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners.

More Dropbox coverage here.

Both are using their own, private clouds, but these security-conscious entities are embracing the paradigm.

His figure puts AWS revenue for EC2 alone at almost $220 million annually. This is real revenue. And we think he estimate for S3 revenues is way low – the bandwidth costs alone are enormous. There are some interesting points raised in the comments. Care to raise any here?