Fail with error rather than silently on storage init problems.

Storage initialization failures currently exit silently but they should at least output an error.
-Mark

I considered that but decided that here we could be sure it was a storage initialization error but higher up we would not. In the case of local storage i guess the problem is simple to narrow down but perhaps it might not if you used redis/mongodb or something else for storage.

However, I'm happy to move it to use a more generic message higher up the stack if you think that it better?