What this all seems to ignore is where the processing is relative to the data. Even given unlimited bandwidth, physics dictates that there is a minimum latency defined by the speed of light and distance it has to travel (over fibre it's about 1ms round-trip time for every 100km). So if you have an application that requires low latency access to its data, then that application is going to have to be in the cloud too.
Of course that's no impediment to applications where latency is not critical to performance, or for backups, archives and so on, but it is to a lot of transactional applications. For that you need the entire package of at least the latency-sensitive parts of you application "in the cloud" and very close to your data. Not much point in those flash drives with latency measured in 100s (or even 10s) of microseconds if you app is sitting on a few ms of network latency.
So I have my doubts that a pure commoditised cloud storage system is going to suit a large proportion of applications.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
