Cloud storage has evolved significantly over time from punch cards to modern cloud services. Early digital storage included punch cards in 1890, drum memory in the 1950s-60s, and floppy disks in the 1970s. Over the decades, storage capacity increased while costs decreased dramatically - from $105,000 per gigabyte in 1980 to under $1 per gigabyte today. Modern cloud storage services now offer petabytes of storage for low costs or free. Cloud storage can be private, public, or hybrid and is provided by major companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others.

1. Cloud Storge is defined as anything that involves
delivering hosted services over the internet
THE HISTORY AND FUTURE OF
CLOUD STORAGE
Sold on demand by the
minute or by the hour.
Fully Managed by the
Provider.
Elastic - A user can have
as much or as little of the
service as they want.
The first digital storage is introduced to
the world when Herman Hollerith used
a punch card to record and read data
for the 1890 census.
International Business Machines,
IBM, forms after several businesses
combine that did computing,
tabulating and recording.
Drum Memory was the precursor to the
modern hard drive platter, invented by
Gustav Tauschek, it was widely used in
the 50s and 60s as computer memory. It
could hold 10 kilobytes of data.
The 5.25” floppy disk was the first
mass-produced consumer storage
device. It was used for saving documents
but also for loading operating systems. It
could hold 1.2 MB of storage.
EMC begins to market the first private
cloud, whereby storage devices are used
at an organizational level. Egan and
Marino, college roommates, fund their
new company by selling furniture.
Steve Jobs at Apple introduces the Macintosh
computer. The world of personal storage is born.
By 1985, the average cost of a gigabyte of
storage is $105,000. 400 KB of storage. The
average cost of a GB of storage is $105,000.
Now we’re talking Gigabytes! In 1980 IBM
introduces the I3380. The price tag:
$142,200. 2.52 gigabytes of storage,
the equivalent of 2,500 floppy disks.
The average cost of a GB of storage
was around $437,500.
NetApp is founded by David Hitz, James Lau
and Michael Malcolm. The average cost
of one gigabyte is around $10,000.
Zip Drives are introduced. It quickly replaced
floppy disks and was ideal for large documents
and graphic design files. 100 MB of storage,
the equivalent of 100 floppy disks. The
average cost of one gigabyte is $1,120.
The Seagate Barracude is the first 7200
RPM drive, a standard speed in most
drives today. Holds 2.5 GB of storage.
IBM DiskOnKey is introduced, the first
thumb drive. This quickly replaced floppy
and zip disks and started the movement
towards flash storage. 8 MB. The average
costof one gigabyte is $11.00.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is launched as a
public beta of elastic compute cloud, running
Microsoft Windows and SQL Servers.
Google introduces Google Docs,
similar to Microsoft Word, which
allows users to create, edit and
collaborate on documents online.
Dropbox is introduced as a file hosting
service, offering cloud storage, file syncing
and client software. The introduction of
personal storage drives further interest into
cloud services on the corporate level.
Solid-State Drive is introduced. With no
moving and parts and less physical space,
SSDs are now the way we store digital media.
64 GB, or roughly 54,613 floppy disks.
Google introduces Google
Cloud Storage, an online file
storage web service for accessing
data on Google’s infrastructure.
The average cost of one
gigabyte is around $0.09.
Larry Ellison of Oracle laid
out his cloud vision of
renting out Oracle apps on
a subscription basis,
known as Software as a
Service (SaaS).
Verizon and VMware unveil an
enterprise-class hybrid cloud
solution that enable enterprises to
move their applications to the cloud
more quickly without compromising
security or performance.
Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage
Service) is an online file
storage web service. The cost
of one gigabyte is about $1.
By definition, cloud storage is
Here’s a look back on the history of digital and cloud storage.
GB
SSDs
1890
1960s1976
1979 1980
1992
1994 1996
20002002
2004
20072008
2010
2014
2006
1984
1924
$1
Cloud Computing can best be understood in terms of 3 entities
SQL
A price war evolves. With little differentiation between product,
companies like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Amazon fight to offer
more storage for cheaper. Companies offer storage for next to nothing,
as a way to position and sell their software and services and attract users.
The cost of one gigabyte is, well, FREE.
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Private/Enterprise Cloud Public Cloud Hybrid Cloud
A marketing term for a proprietary
computing architecture that provides
hosted services to a limited number of
people behind a firewall (Source:
techtarget.com)
The major players are: HP/3PAR,
Oracle, IBM, CISCO and VMware.
Other companies that play a role are
EMC, FalconStor, Fusion-IO and NetApp.
A set of computers and computer network
resources based on the standard cloud
computing model, in which a service
provider makes resources, such as
applications andstorage, available to
the general public over the Internet.
The major players are: Google, Microsoft
Azure, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter.
Other companies that play a role are
Salesforce and Yahoo.
A hybrid cloud is a cloud computing
environment in which an organization
provides and manages some
resources in-house and has others
provided externally
The major players are: Verizon,
Rackspace and Terremark.
Organization
PublicIn-House
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The Future
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