The new great review of Storj DCS by Prof. Portelli made it clear that Storj DCS is a great storage for large datasets that need to be shared around the world by research and scientific communities.
The big question is, how Storj can come into contact with those and offer Storj DCS as storage to them.
I came across an European initiative that aims to bring together providers of all kinds with users from research, science and universities to form an open cloud for sharing and accessing research data the European Open Science Cloud
They offer a marketplace which is more like a catalogue, where Storj could try to register as service provider and offer Storj DCS as resource in the storage category.
Just as an example, the German provider Deutsche Telekom already offers one of their storage products through this channel: Open Telekom Cloud.
Also CloudFerro is already offering services on that platform and maybe through such a channel Storj could also come into contact with companies like that who might be interested in the distributed way of storing big data for great performance to offer to their customers.
@bre
Maybe you want to make the team aware of this. To me this looks like an interesting option to get in contact with users from science and research who might be interested in the specific capabilities that Storj DCS offers.
And it was very interesting when Prof. Portelli said:
we’re really considering for the future to add that as a component of the storage we offer to users
I believe that’s an amazing statement. Imagine if more universities would follow that and offer Storj DCS as storage option to their users from various university departments for the purpose of big data storage and transfer.
In my experience there is lot of red tape involved to pitch new ideas to people that are already working with AWS. Why use Storj? What’s in it for you? Are you getting commission off of it ? Then some would be unwilling to allocate/reallocate funds for new ventures.
I was told this once, AWS has been here for ages. What if Storj is bought by Amazon then we will end up using AWS anyway. Some would take a step back the moment they hear anything about crypto and worry about government oversight.
Just guessing here but if Storj dealt purely in fiat then it might get wider adoption.
I would love to know what stops potential clients from using Storj.
All true. Storj DCS needs to offer one or more advantages over existing solutions.
There is price for example. But what also comes into play is what Prof. Portelli is saying in that review and could be important especially for scientific and researchers. I think he literally said that the performance is above what to expect from centralized cloud providers, that they were not able to break it and that costs are lower.
Spreading this word in the scientific community to users who deal with big data could create some interest.
Of course AWS offers more than just storage, which can be a major blocker when users are not just using the storage service but also VMs and whatever else.
In most cases when you use AWS S3, you also use EC2, RDS, block storage, may be even ECS or EKS or hybrid.
And you basically locked in, because of a high egress costs.
Storj Labs can help with the later (we have ways to reduce it or eliminate), but we cannot offer a compute service.
And if your compute services would remain on AWS, you will get so much from it regarding costs. But! You will use a truly encrypted and fast globally available storage instead of Amazon S3.