However, he adds, "at this point, we can't look to Zetta as primary storage." He says the clear value of cloud storage is as a low-cost archive for Encyclopedia Virginia's countless images and audio and video files. "I like knowing that we have another place [to store] this stuff," Hedlund says.

Cloudize Inc., a collaboration service, uses cloud storage from Nirvanix Inc. in San Diego. The San Francisco-based start-up pays the same rate as Encyclopedia Virginia -- 25 cents per gigabyte per month, which Cloudize CEO Edwin Fu says is ideal for planning and budgeting. But he also likes the fact that Nirvanix applies that price to his entire company's online storage use, instead of charging on a per-user basis.

Fu says Cloudize couldn't afford a traditional service from a company like Rackspace Hosting Inc.

Nick Bali, a senior software engineer at Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc. in Culver City, Calif., is looking into the possibility of building a private cloud using software from ParaScale Inc. His plan is to create a setup that could handle a production environment that requires up to 3,000 servers to process the 50TB to 100TB of data necessary for a single production.