[TuaAmin13]

For the case of near-line storage I believe this would work. I understand why you would need this in that case.

At that point you'd simply have to address pricing. With some napkin math I just paid $15/TB/month (for duration of warranty) for near-line storage. I'm taking liberties here with assumptions (no power or cooling but this offsets the cost of longer transfers to the cloud vs internal to your data center). I'm also not factoring in personnel costs.

For consumers I have absolutely no idea what the pricing would be like. $15/TB/month seems cheap and I would probably be expecting something between 25 and 100GB for that same price if you told me what your product does.

[databace78]

Impressive technology...but there are a number of products that do what you've built (or come close). Someone already mentioned Nasuni.

TwinStrata might be closer (block oriented I think, iSCSI interface). http://www.twinstrata.com

I think Gartner refers to these products as "cloud storage gateways." Also known as "hybrid cloud storage." Google either of those to get a list.

Good question about the pain points TuaAmin. Those usually include: a) never having to run out of storage again b) never having to deal w/ tape backups again c) knowing you can recover data to anywhere in the event of a disaster

[drumber]

I think you should look at StorSimple too: http://www.storsimple.com as well; there are indeed already fairly mature products in the market that tackle this market opportunity with pretty compelling solutions.