"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of backup tapes"

Said Andrew S. Tanenbaum, back in '96.
Netflix's CEO, when asked about their concept of sending DVDs and return envelopes to subscribers, quoted him as inspiration - Back in 2002, I was in Boston , lecturing about telephony switches test simulators, and discussed that quote with a manager from Intel when speaking about big bandwidth networks and the fact that they might replace physical media, eventually.

Few years down the road, and looks like Amazon were listening: http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/.

Thanks to Boaz Ziniman, zend's cloud expert, for the link.