*Hey, nice term of art, 'evaporate.'
(...)
"Over the past year, storage service providers have been dropping quickly.
"EMC last year announced it was shutting down its Atmos Online storage service because it was competing with its own resellers. At the time, EMC offered no guarantee that its customers could retrieve their data once the service closed. On the heels of the Atmos shutdown, cloud storage provider Vaultscape also closed.
"Earlier this month, Iron Mountain announced it had stopped accepting new customers for its Virtual File Store service and was planning to shut it down over the next two years. ((("Gloomy cloud blows off Iron Mountain," etc etc, the metaphors there practically write themselves.)))
"Then, last week, it was startup Cirtas Systems' turn; it announced it was leaving the market to regroup.
"According to Gartner, pure-play public cloud storage service providers have had a modest level of adoption. Now, only Nirvanix and Zetta remain as pure cloud providers of network attached storage.
"It's only natural that the herd of public cloud service providers is being culled," Taneja said. "The industry is overreacting. (((To the "culled herd" of "clouds"? Can the dead ones be skinned and turned into cloudleather handbags?)))
"And, it's still in that overhyped stage."...
(((Should be interesting when the cloud gets that "defunct" stage that Gartner never much likes to analyze. Have you ever seen a white-paper on the wreckage of the Information Superhighway?)))
