NASUNI http://www.nasuni.com http://www.nasuni.com started out with the same idea but now has become much bigger focused on enterprise market. As a Storage Prod

NASUNI http://www.nasuni.com http://www.nasuni.com started out with the same idea but now has become much bigger focused on enterprise market. As a Storage Product Manager managing a Storage Virtualization software product over a decade ago, I researched this idea. Also, my first startup was addressing similar problem - consolidation of unused storage space within a geographically dispersed enterprise. Both happened before "cloud" term became popular and S3 wasn't even a service. Technically, it is a difficult problem to solve if the product need to be software based, simple, transparent and targeted at consumer market so that user can install on their laptops/workstations. The product will need to sit in the middle and capture every operation between OS and DropBox, GDrive, and OneDrive etc. It is not a trivial problem to solve. A solution that uses a target storage device on a network which in the background sync with different online storage service providers is a better alternative and that is what NASUNI and a few others pursued. But now you are in consumer/SMB storage hardware business. Another better solution option is for users to only install one piece of software (ex: OwnCloud) which uploads to one cloud and then sync with other services in the background. Overall, my impression is that online storage providers offer very little support for such services that try to consolidate storage from different service providers. On business side, it will be very difficult to make money of people who want to consolidate "free" space from different services. Such people are inherently cheap and wouldn't pay for your service either. So this will lead you to target SMB/enterprise market where typical mindset is to use one service like S3, Box, or Dropbox. So your value proposition has to change from distributed and large online storage system to redundancy, disaster recover, data access and data protection. Such solutions still have the single point of failure - your service. You will need to somehow need to be overcome. Overall, I believe it is a good idea in principle, figuring out a business model, distribution and customer discovery may be a larger challenge.