I'm not convinced
I can see where you're coming from, but surely the tubes are still an issue? If you are generating petabytes of data you really need to store it close to where it is being created and used. So cloud storage is fine if you're also generating your data in the cloud, but not so good if you're generating it on your premises and you need a 2 foot wide fibre channel all the way from you to the cloud to transfer the stuff.
Okay, very big organisations can afford very big tubes, but they willl have to be very very big to support petabytes. And the same argument works at all levels - for a home or small business user with bog standard ADSL and 480kb upload cloud backup really isn't much use if you need to upload a few gig a day. Ditto for businesses.
I don't think the market for large on-site storage is going to completely disappear for a while.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
