Large corporations remain largely wary of embracing public clouds--such as those offered by Amazon, EMC, Microsoft or Rackspace--for their storage needs, preferring to continue investing in their own storage programs and gear. But the challenges that cloud storage providers confront today may predict those that enterprises will face in the future, writes Gary Orenstein in a post at GigaOm.

Like cloud providers, large enterprises have to deal with immense volumes of data and a lot of geographically dispersed users. Orenstein spells out four ways that providers are dealing with these challenges, some of which are becoming enterprise solutions as well. 

• Commodity hardware to reduce storage costs,
• User segmentation,
• Streamlined management through open APIs, and
• Geographically distributed storage availability.

Meanwhile, recognizing the continued interest among corporations in buying storage software and hardware of their own, two new start-ups have entered the storage market, writes Stacey Higginbotham in a post at GigaOm. The basic trend in the industry "is about bringing memory closer to the processor and packing in as much information while optimizing for either cost or speed," she writes.

For more:
- see Gary Orenstein's post at GigaOm
- see Stacey Higginbotham's post at GigaOm

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