An Alternative Storage Method?

So last night just before I went to bed I saw a posting on Slashdot about how Sun plans on getting rid of it’s in-house data centers by using Software as a Service (SaaS) instead (link). One of the reasons that they gave for doing this is to reduce their energy usage and that must have sparked something in my mind because I started think about getting rid of servers to reduce energy as I tried (and failed) to fall asleep.