This paper presents a taxonomy of key topics effecting research and development of distributed storage systems. The taxonomy finds distributed storage systems to offer a wide array of functionality, employ architectures with varying degrees of entralisation and operate a ross environments with varying trust and scalability. Furthermore, taxonomies on autonomi management, federation, onsistency and routing provide an insight into challenges faced by distributed storage systems and the research to over ome them. The paper continues by providing a survey of distributed storage systems which exemplify topics overed in the taxonomy.The selection of surveyed systems overs a variety of storage systems, exposing the reader to an array of different problems and solutions employed to over come these challenges. For each surveyed system we address the underlying operational behaviour, leading into the architecture and algorithms employed in the design and development of the system. Our survey overs systems from the past and present concluding with a discussion on the evolution of distributed storage systems and possible future work.