Moving Data To The Cloud: 24 Offerings To Help Partners Build Storage Clouds

Putting The Pieces In Place For Cloud Storage

Solution providers have a growing arsenal of tools aimed at helping build storage clouds in response to a variety of customer requirements. Whether it's for security concerns, or for specific applications, or because of the realization that public clouds are not as cost-effective as users often think, made-to-order storage clouds offer very real alternatives to the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and their peers.

For CRN's 2016 Cloud Storage Week, we're taking a look at 24 offerings that provide major components to storage clouds that solution providers can build. Of course, this is only scratching the surface, as there are a great deal of other components ranging from external cache controllers to cloud storage gateways that help keep cloud-based storage private and secure.

However, if a partner prefers to avoid the do-cloud-yourself step, there are many options for helping customers take advantage of pre-built clouds. CRN profiled 16 such offerings earlier this week.

Here's a look at the possibilities.

Asigra Cloud Backup

Asigra Cloud Backup from Toronto-based Asigra is comprehensive, agentless cloud-based data protection software designed to help managed service providers deploy, provision and sell backup as a service to SMB and enterprise customers. Asigra Cloud Backup software can be deployed to protect data sources across heterogeneous environments from physical and virtual machines to user devices, Docker containers, and AWS or Azure or other cloud infrastructures. The agentless, multitenant software includes a billing module, LAN Storage Discovery, a cloud license server, reporting and notifications, service-level agreement monitoring and management, VMware and Hyper-V replication, configurable geo-location APIs, and remote wipe capabilities. Asigra Cloud Backup works in the cloud or on-premise.

Caringo Swarm9

Austin, Texas-based Caringo’s Swarm9 object storage offering turns standard hardware into a scalable, reliable pool of resources for developing massively scalable cloud storage. This self-managing offering unifies data silos and simultaneously handles mixed-use cases with a single deployment. Caringo leverages a purpose-built clustering architecture that transforms standard hardware into a reliable and searchable pool of scalable storage. Offered as a complete software or hardware appliance, Swarm as a cloud storage platform includes data protection, management, organization and search at massive scale. Customers can consolidate all files on Swarm, and can continuously evolve hardware and optimize use of resources as capacity scales to hundreds of terabytes or petabytes. Partners can use Swarm to deliver private cloud storage services or a public cloud storage service like Amazon S3.

Cloudian HyperStore

Cloudian, San Mateo, Calif., calls Cloudian HyperStore the on-premise equivalent of the public cloud in that it uses the same APIs, offers the same limitless scalability, and provides chargebacks, letting managed service providers meet customer needs for petabyte-scale storage. It is targeted primarily at managed service providers.

Cloudian HyperStore is an offering for object storage with a choice of fully integrated appliances, software for industry-standard servers, or a metered-by-use model from Amazon. Data can be stored locally and/or in the Amazon or Google public cloud, all as a single pool of storage.

DataCore SANsymphony Software-Defined Storage Platform With Bulk Storage

The DataCore SANsymphony software-defined storage platform with Bulk Storage from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based DataCore provides solution providers with an inexpensive option for pooling physical storage across multiple servers to build a private storage cloud. The software helps solution providers and managed service providers turn standard x86 servers into high-density direct-attach storage devices that can be pooled with storage arrays and presented as a private storage cloud. Data is highly available with synchronous mirroring for zero downtime and/or asynchronous replication for disaster recovery. The offering also includes single-pane, automated management to reduce management time and more quickly respond to customer requirements.

Dell EMC VxRail Appliance With CloudArray

Dell EMC's VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure appliances can be paired with Dell EMC CloudArray, a cloud-integrated storage offering that extends storage arrays with private or public cloud capacity. The combined offering, based on VMware's VxRail software stack and VSAN software-defined storage technology, lets channel partners help customers in VMware virtualized environments provide storage capacity that expands seamlessly to clouds. CloudArray lets customers take advantage of cloud-based storage economics while keeping 10 percent of the data local, all without manual intervention. As a result, cloud storage looks, feels and performs like local storage but scales like cloud storage, the company said.

FormationOne Dynamic Storage Platform

Private cloud storage built on the FormationOne dynamic storage platform from Fremont, Calif.-based Formation Data Systems delivers configurable block, file and object storage services to support a broad range of use cases including the ability to migrate data into public cloud infrastructures using the AWS S3 interface. FormationOne software is integrated with partner-provided server hardware and service offerings to let enterprises build self-contained private storage clouds and service providers build managed storage-as-a-service offerings.

FormationOne includes integrated continuous data protection to facilitate automation of snapshots and clones via REST APIs. It also includes dynamic quality of service capabilities that support mixed application workloads with native multitenancy. Inline deduplication, compression and encryption make the data efficient and secure. FormationOne also includes SafeGuard, a software module that replicates cloud data to private data centers or public clouds.

Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform 2.0

The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform Version 2.0 is a software-defined storage platform that spans any workload, cloud and storage tier, and includes native integration with Docker Datacenter, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Mesos for cloud orchestration and automation. The offering from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Hedvig is based on the company's Universal Data Plane, which guarantees data locality and service availability across clouds. The Universal Data Plane is a programmable software layer that enables any application to store and protect data across any location. It plugs into modern orchestration and automation frameworks, and replaces the need for separate storage gear with a solution that runs on commodity servers in private clouds and as instances in public clouds.

Hitachi Enterprise Cloud With VMware vRealize

Hitachi Enterprise Cloud with VMware vRealize from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Hitachi Data Systems provides a pre-built catalog of server, storage, data protection and four levels of support service to help solution providers build enterprise-class hybrid or private clouds. It utilizes a pre-engineered and pre-built service catalog and a single control point for both the private cloud and public cloud resources. This offering gives channel partners a turnkey approach for hybrid clouds combining Hitachi UCP on-premise storage and public cloud resources such as AWS, all consolidated within VMware vRealize. The offering also includes Hitachi Unified Compute Platform Director (UCP Director) fully integrated with vRealize to manage the physical and virtual private cloud infrastructure and non-virtualized workloads and applications.

Huawei FusionStorage

Shenzhen, China-based Huawei's FusionStorage deploys industry-standard servers as high-reliability cloud storage systems with distributed block storage software designed for large-scale data center operations. The offering provides distributed storage architecture and advanced data routing, caching, and global load-balancing technologies to ensure storage performance and availability storage while allowing petabyte scalability.

FusionStorage's open interfaces and APIs allow customization to support both traditional and cloud-based storage resources while addressing specialized requirements for mission-critical applications in several verticals. It supports up to 4,096 storage nodes and 196 petabytes of capacity, with performance of more than 10 million IOPS on high-speed 56-Gbps InfiniBand networks.

IBM Spectrum Storage Suite

IBM Spectrum Storage Suite is a family of software-defined storage offerings specifically targeted at solution providers looking to build flexible cloud storage for a variety of workloads. It includes six software-defined storage products that address needs for block storage, file and object storage, storage virtualization, archive, data protection, and storage and data management. IBM Spectrum Storage Suite licenses all of these offerings on a per-terabyte basis, and allows customers to use any combination of offerings. Service providers can switch capacity quickly and easily among offerings as needed and without changing licenses. Specifically for service providers, IBM Spectrum Storage Suite can be acquired on a monthly basis or via a utility license that allows flexible changes in capacity. It is also available via traditional perpetual licenses.

Igneous Data Service

The Igneous Data Service from Seattle-based Igneous Systems offers a cloud for local data that supports the S3 API for enterprise cloud-based object storage. Like public clouds, the Igneous Data Service offers Zero-Touch Infrastructure under which Igneous handles all monitoring, maintenance, software updates and troubleshooting of on-premisesequipment used by the Igneous Data Service. That purpose-built, on-premise equipment is owned and operated by Igneous but sits behind customers' firewalls to protect the data. The on-premise equipment and the services are provided via a single subscription fee based on installed capacity.

Customers' internal applications and systems can access the Igneous Data Service at LAN speeds rather than internet speeds. And because the data is kept on-premises customers can continue using their internal security and compliance policies.

Kaminario K2 All-flash Storage Array

The Kaminario K2 all-flash storage array from Needham, Mass.-based Kaminario includes the OpenStack Cinder storage driver to provide enterprises and channel partners with the ability to build high-performance private storage clouds with open-source platforms. With its OpenStack support, the Kaminario K2 provides a scale-up and scale-out architecture for private cloud development. In-line data compression and deduplication cut the capacity needed. The Kaminario K2 includes the company's K-Assured program, which provides six optional guarantees based on minimum effective storage capacity, performance, availability, scale, maintenance and SSD life cycle.

Nexsan Unity

Unity from Campbell, Calif.-based Nexsan is a scalable, flexible unified storage device that lets solution providers mix and match high-performance flash with inexpensive hard disks to provide block and file storage for midsize to enterprise customers. Unity provides private cloud functionality that remains under corporate IT control, including a plug-and-play ability to sync files across multiple disparate locations with secure communication across standard internet connections. This offering supports collaboration and file sharing via mobile devices. It also includes an integrated, secure archive for long-term data storage, and uses peer-to-peer replication at the file level.

Nimble All-Flash Arrays

Nimble Storage, San Jose, Calif., targets sales of its Nimble all-flash arrays in large part at cloud service providers looking to offer storage clouds to their clients. The Nimble all-flash arrays provide cloud service providers, including Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service providers, with the ability to optimize storage costs to match service levels. In addition, the company's InfoSight Predictive Analytics, which is included with all Nimble flash arrays, helps simplify operations and avoid potential issues.

Cloud service providers can take advantage of per-gigabyte-per-month pricing, which means they pay for only the capacity used. Nimble automatically provisions enough storage to ensure cloud service providers do not run out of capacity.

Pivot3 vSTAC SLX

Pivot3's vSTAC SLX adds a tier of all-flash or hybrid-flash storage to the Austin, Texas-based company's hyper-converged infrastructure offering beyond what would be added with a new compute/storage node. This lets cloud builders, cloud service providers or managed service providers scale either low-cost or high-performance capacity and to segregate certain storage volumes from the hyper-converged infrastructure cluster. Cloud providers can also charge different rates based on storage tiers within the hyper-converged environment. The all-flash or hybrid storage tiers and the hyper-converged infrastructure clusters are managed via a VMware vCenter Server plug-in.

The vSTAC SLX also provides dynamic quality of service capabilities including pre-defined policies to apply to client storage volumes or virtual machines, the ability to prioritize certain applications and volumes over others, and the use of multiple tiers of storage-media-based policies.

Pure Storage FlashStack Mini

FlashStack Mini is a converged infrastructure solution that pre-integrates the FlashArray//m10 all-flash storage array from Mountain View, Calif.-based Pure Storage with the UCS Mini servers and integrated fabric from San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco Systems. FlashStack Mini is designed for smaller private cloud deployments or segmented workloads, particularly in branch offices or smaller application deployments. The FlashArray//m10 was originally designed internal all-flash clouds, and is cloud-connected to provide predictive support along with analytics and data protection.

Scality RING 6.0

The Scality RING 6.0 is a scale-out software-defined storage platform from San Francisco-based Scality that is designed to power storage clouds. It turns any standard x86 servers into web-scale storage. The RING allows service providers to store any amount of data, of any type, with guaranteed 100 percent reliability. It currently serves more than 500 million end users worldwide with more than 800 billion objects in production, the company said.

The RING scales out with demand, and lets service providers and other channel partners deploy cost-effective cloud storage for unstructured data-intensive applications such as voice mail, mobile video, messaging, medical imagery and more, which often involve millions of simultaneous requests.

SoftNAS Cloud 3.4.8

SoftNAS Cloud is Houston-based SoftNAS' software-defined, enterprise-class NAS virtual storage appliance for public, private and hybrid clouds. SoftNAS Cloud supports NFS, CIFS/SMB, iSCSI and Apple File Protocol (AFP) file protocols, allowing data to migrate to the cloud without the need to re-architect the applications. Capacity can grow to petabytes, with unlimited capacity per instance or per high availability pair depending on application and workload.

SoftNAS Cloud allows managed service providers to build private and hybrid clouds, and works with public clouds including AWS and Azure. It also supports Active Directory and protects data with encryption of data at rest and in flight, as well as offers customers a money-back, 99.999-percent uptime service level agreement.

Stratoscale Symphony

Stratoscale Symphony is turnkey software that enables partners to offer comprehensive cloud infrastructure and services using any industry-standard x86-based hardware. The software, from Herzelia, Israel-based Stratoscale, offers comprehensive and scalable block storage and object storage functionality that supports AWS APIs, including S3.

Stratoscale Symphony's storage is native to the hypervisor, which helps reduce latency and overhead while increasing throughput, the company said. The distributed storage service stripes all I/O across each available storage device in the rack to help prevent failures. It scales up and out by adding more commodity x86 servers or across existing storage assets already in the data center.

Tintri Enterprise Cloud Platform

Tintri, Mountain View, Calif., offers an enterprise cloud infrastructure built on all-flash storage with scale-out automation and predictive analytics, public cloud-like web services, and RESTful APIs. Enterprises and cloud service providers can use Tintri to create new cloud-native and enterprise applications, manage those applications across hypervisors, and scale to hundreds of thousands of virtual machines.

Tintri delivers automated performance at cloud scale by isolating every application to eliminate conflicts. Customers and partners can establish service tiers with per-virtual machine quality of service, and troubleshoot latency issues across the host, network and storage. The offering allows operational, purchase,and planning decisions based on real-time analytics and predictive modeling using the behavior of individual virtual machines. Integration with third-party management frameworks VMware vRealize Operations helps simplify management of the enterprise cloud.

Veeam Cloud Connect for Service Providers

Veeam Cloud Connect for Service Providers gives cloud service providers a simple platform for offering disaster-recovery-as-a-service and backup-as-a-service to their customers who use Veeam's data protection software. The offering, from Baar, Switzerland-based Veeam, helps complete hybrid cloud infrastructures with efficient image-based replication for disaster recovery for any workload regardless of the storage, application or operating system. Pricing is monthly on a per-virtual machine subscription. Veeam Cloud Connect for Service Providers also manages any required network changes for disaster recovery testing and failover, without the need for manual setup or virtual private networks.

Zadara Storage Cloud

The Zadara Storage Cloud from Zadara Storage is an enterprise-grade storage cloud offering where multiple tenants can run the Irvine, Calif.-based company's own VPSA file and block storage or the ZIOS object storage offering on the same physical cloud architecture without ’noisy neighbor’ issues. Built on industry-standard hardware, the Zadara Storage Cloud offers a private cloud and natively supports AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The Zadara Storage Cloud is fully managed by Zadara with a 100 percent service-level agreement regardless of whether the data is in a private or public cloud. Options include flash storage-as-a-service with Intel SSDs and components, Docker or Zadara container services, and backup to AWS S3.

ZeroStack Cloud Platform

The ZeroStack Cloud Platform from ZeroStack lets enterprises and hosting providers create a self-service private cloud for IT and developers. It combines hyper-converged infrastructure with self-healing software and cloud-based management to deliver a turnkey cloud offering without the need to deal with traditional IT infrastructure issues. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company claims its software can create a fully optimized on-premise cloud leveraging hyper-converged platforms in 20 minutes.

Zetta Disaster Recovery

Zetta Disaster Recovery is a cloud-first disaster recovery offering that provides sub-five-minute failover with the push of a button. The offering from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Zetta targets managed service providers to brand it with their own name. Zetta Disaster Recovery allows small and midsize enterprise customers and partners to continue accessing business-critical applications with minimal disruption during a downtime event. It provides complete deployment-to-failback coverage, with up-front network, firewall, VPN and connectivity configuration and automated DR testing that can be customized.