Peter Burris called today and said storage, at .04 cents per megabyte is substantially less than dialtone (comparing what it costs to store one minute of audio on a hard drive versus a one minute phone conversation).
Xdrive sure understands this. It will sell you 50GB's of storage per month for $10. It doesn't take long for Xdrive to break even on that deal. What's more, if Xdrive sells 50 virtualized gigabytes, anything you don't use they can sell to someone else-- double dipping on the unused physical capacity.
If Xdrive gets this, you can be sure Google and Microsoft do too. Vendors with easy-to-use software based on the principles of virtualization are delivering cost effective services that meter capacity available, capacity utilized, cost per month and security levels. Recovery objectives are not far off. I know application and business owners who crave for this level of simplicity and transparency.
Action Item: Consumer-oriented services companies are encroaching on the domain of established storage vendors using highly scalable business models and technologies like virtualization as the underpinning of their competitive strategies. In order to recoup substantial software R&D investments, established storage vendors will have to either compete head on with their own services business models, flee to high ground transaction-oriented mission critical businesses or both.
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