It's actually a fair bit harder to offer generic key/value large object storage than to offer a backup system that talks to a client you wrote yourself. Of cou

It's actually a fair bit harder to offer generic key/value large object storage than to offer a backup system that talks to a client you wrote yourself. Of course these days there are well-understood solutions to those problems, compared to when S3 first started, but it's still not stuff you can pull off the shelf. (Although with the Cassandra distributed database, the metadata problem is close to that point now. </plug>)