The Hot Aisle ran a poll recently asking you all about Cloud Storage and we got some very interesting results from over 5600 respondents:

We asked the question – Does Cloud Storage have to be delivered as an Object Store?

Here are my observations:-

• A surprising number of folks don’t know what Cloud Storage is!
• Most people thing that Object Stores are key to building a cloud storage infrastructure
• There is a lot of confusion in this space.

Vendors like EMC with their Atmos product perhaps need to be helping with some education, whilst those vendors who have a gap in their product range need to fill it quickly. My take is that this area is likely to explode soon.

Chris Mellor (from The Register) and I had a couple of exchanges about the definition of cloud storage and this is what came out:

Cloud Storage is horizontally Internet scalable and globally available/usable with public cloud being pay on use.