Nemertes Impact Analysis:

Privately held Zetta's cloud-based enterprise network-attached storage (NAS) offering underscores the constant struggle many IT staffs face in coping with rapid storage growth. Accessible with standard NAS protocols like CIFS and NFS, Zetta aims to distinguish itself from competing cloud storage providers through implementation features standard to in-house storage such as encryption and snap-shots. Small companies may find this appealing, despite a price tag of $250/month for the first terabyte and $0.25/month per gigabyte after that, given that they project an average 42% storage growth this year, and already average 160G of central storage per employee.

Impacts:

Enterprises: If you are running out of space (or power, or cooling) for disk arrays, you should consider enterprise-focused cloud storage services in 2010; almost anything is cheaper than building a new data center.

Vendors: Zetta is foucsed on giving enterprise users in-house features requiring no special APIs; other cloud vendors should too.

Investors: Startup Nirvanix also gets it; both are potential acquisition targets for service providers such as Global Crossing (NASDAQ:GLBC) or vendors such as Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL).

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