After typing in the word Cloud and running my search, I had 2 engines that had the first result taking you to Wikipedia to talk about Cloud computing. The other search engine still took you to Wikipedia, but it was talking about the visible liquid droplets or frozen crystals suspended in the atmosphere that we all know and love. Which one was that you might ask? Go try it for yourself and see.

The fact one search engine out of those three did not list Cloud computing as result number 1 actually surprises me a little. These days everyone is talking about it and looking at how their organization can potentially benefit from moving certain services, or applications to the cloud. Plus, people don’t get that much revenue for advertising cumulus clouds. I’d say cloud computing services are more likely to be profitable.

With cloud computing though comes one challenge. Especially as a service provider, how much storage do you need if you’re offering these hosted services? Well, obviously it has to be wicked scalable, the cheaper the better, and reliable! Tough combination…cheap, and reliable? Ya, I said it…. I found a blog post the other day from a company called BackBlaze (http://backblaze.com ). They’re just your basic online backup company that provides services to individuals that want to backup their important files and not worry about hard-drive armageddon. Now, don’t confuse BackBlaze with a company like Ubistor (http://ubistor.com) that specializes in online backups but are tailored a lot more specifically to businesses. Same idea, different markets.

Moving forward, BackBlaze realized that to offer this service, they need scalable, cheap, and reliable storage for their customers. Using a little ingenuity, I’d say they were able to meet those requirements.

WARNING: CAPS LOCK EXCITEMENT – 67 TERABYTES for around $8,000!!! Wow. Now, before we all rush out to buy everything on their B.O.M… read the article in its entirety before blowing your paychecks and buying up lottery tickets.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/