Why would they sell it directly? Works better if they can advertise their one of a kind, super stable, cloud specific data archival solution that nobody else can replicate. Or not even advertise it, but maintain lower storage costs per byte relative to AWS or Google.
As far as I know, the technology behind Amazon Glacier has never been shared. Glass disks could eventually be backing the Microsoft equivalent.
I doubt the decisions on the product came down along that logic.
Surely they could make more money by selling it in some form or another. If the economics actually gave them a storage cost advantage over AWS/GCP, then profitability must be possible.
In reality it's probably incredibly expensive, and the ROI could not be obtained without even further investment to drive the costs down.
>Why would they sell it directly? Works better if they can advertise their one of a kind, super stable, cloud specific data archival solution that nobody else can replicate.
Because network speeds aren't high enough to back up terabytes of data remotely on a regular basis. This would only work if you already store all your data with this vendor, which is probably a stupid move.
If network speeds aren't enough, there's Azure Data box, which is the equivalent to AWS Snowball, where they mail you a hard drive and you ship it back to them and they put it in their cloud.
As far as I know, the technology behind Amazon Glacier has never been shared. Glass disks could eventually be backing the Microsoft equivalent.