Cloud Storage, What happened in 2010
Year 2010 was a busy year for cloud storage. The buzz reached a whole new level when you saw companies like Microsoft, Google and EMC announcing new service offerings around cloud storage.
Event Calendar
| Date | Summary |
| February 1, 2010 | Windows Azure out of beta, starts billing. Finally ready for customers. |
| February 8, 2010 | Amazon S3 introduce versioning support |
| March 9, 2010 | Amazon S3 stores over 1000 billion objects |
| March 24, 2010 | Gladinet Cloud Desktop reached 2.0 |
| April 12, 2010 | Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 released. Windows Azure support is built-in. |
| April 27, 2010 | Gladinet introduced CloudAFS - gateway to cloud storage. |
| May 10, 2010 | EMC World markets "The journey to the private cloud" message for EMC Atmos, announced AT&T, Peer1 as Atmos deployments (for public cloud) |
| May 19, 2010 | Amazon S3 introduced Reduced Redundancy Storage. Further reduced the S3 price. The announcement was ahead of the Google I/O event. |
| May 20, 2010 | Google Storage for Developer announced at Google I/O event. Preview is invitation only. It is similar to S3. |
| June 13, 2010 | Parascale funding failed |
| July 1, 2010 | EMC Atmos Online (public cloud) shuts down. EMC Atmos is still good as a technology behind cloud storage for other service providers. |
| July 5, 2010 | Gladinet introduced Cloud Space services. |
| August 9, 2010 | Mezeo Software Announces Availability of Mezeo Interoperability API. It is similar to S3. |
| August 11, 2010 | Gladinet introduced Cloud Backup - turnkey backup solution to cloud storage |
| October 20, 2010 | EMC Atmos sign up MTI and Redstor as UK deployments. |
| October 22, 2010 | OpenStack "Austin" release, reaching Alpha/Beta quality. |
| October 24, 2010 | Gladinet introduced Cloud Storage Access Suite 2.4. Also announced support for Rackspace Cloud Files and Caringo CAStor |
| October 26, 2010 | Google Storage for Developer starts billing. Ready for customers. |
| October 26, 2010 | Caringo Castor reached 5.0. |
| November 10, 2010 | Amazon S3 Introduce Multi-part upload, pause/resume |
2010 Review
(1) Amazon S3 continues to lead
Amazon S3 reached over 100 billion objects in 2010. It continues to be the leader of cloud storage with features like versioning support, reduced redundancy storage and multi-part upload.
(2) EMC Atmos based offering is gaining ground
EMC shuts down EMC Atmos online and focused on supplying the EMC Atmos solution to hosting providers that would like to offer public cloud storage services.
(3) Microsoft and Google solutions are delivered
We saw Windows Azure started billing customers in Q1. We saw Google Storage for Developers started billing in Q4. We will see how they compare to S3 in year 2011
(4) The line between public cloud and private cloud is blurred
We saw EMC Atmos with a private cloud messaging and continues to deliver to public cloud service provider. We saw Caringo with a private cloud focus released version 5.0, with public cloud like features.
(5) Cloud Storage continues to drive down storage cost
We saw cloud storage solution providers continue to deliver cloud storage solutions built on top of commodity hardware. As one of our partner puts it – No one wants to store junk email (refers to day-to-day Internet storage usage) in banking equipment (refers to expensive EMC SAN devices)
(6) Cloud Storage use cases shaping up
It is getting clearer that cloud storage use cases include:
- Offsite Backup (still #1 use case)
- Multi-site data sharing
- Personal anywhere access storage
- Replace traditional file server
Gladinet is releasing products and services one after another for these different use cases. All together, the products form the Gladinet Cloud Storage Access Suite, which was released in Q4.
(7) The buzz is up but it is still early
We saw cloud storage solution company like Parascale failed to secure the next round of funding and the revenue didn’t catch up soon enough. We saw open source project like OpenStack still in alpha/beta stage. It is still early for the cloud storage market maturity. Many companies are in the Proof of Concept phase too.
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