Google Labs have just released a paper about Big Table. Big Table is “a sparse, distributed, persistent multidimensional
sorted map” that provides other Google components with a scalable and reliable persistent data storage layer. This is one of several infrastructure components that Google apps are built from including: Map Reduce, GFS, etc.

The thought that is going through my head is whether Google might open up this system and allow the public to use it. Clearly you could use Big Table as a file storage medium. This could then become a direct competitor to Amazon‘s S3 file storage service. That would be an interesting battle 🙂

Via Greg (as usual)