Daring businesses to switch from Amazon to a company they've never heard of for cloud storage is a bold challenge. But Wasabi Technologies' founders were so encouraged by its product launch that they raised another $10.8 million to fund a second data center.

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Wasabi CEO David Friend said he expected the free trial of 1 TB for 30 days to attract a few dozen prospects when it became available on May 3. When more than 500 signed up, the Boston-based startup had to waitlist new subscribers until the week of May 17 to keep up with the server capacity demand.

Friend said about 80 users have converted to paying customers, and Wasabi boosted the available storage capacity at its leased data center space in Ashburn, Va., from about 7 PB to more than 20 PB to stay 90 days ahead of demand.

Those customers are likely lured mostly by Wasabi's claims that its cloud storage is significantly cheaper and faster than Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). They may also find it encouraging that Wasabi founders Friend and CTO Jeff Flowers also started Carbonite, an early successful cloud storage player for consumers and small and medium-sized businesses.

The founders also likely learned a few things from Flowers' post-Carbonite efforts to build on-premises cold data storage for financial and security firms and service providers. Storiant, initially known as SageCloud, raised $14.8 million in equity and debt between August 2012 and May 2015. But Storiant shut down operations in November 2015 and sold off its intellectual property for a mere $90,000.

"They were selling hardware systems and ended up competing with EMC, Dell and HP, which I thought was a mistake," said Friend, who was CEO and later executive chairman at Carbonite, as well as a director on Storiant's board.

In 2016, Friend, Flowers and Storiant's founding engineers shifted their focus back to public cloud storage at BlueArchive, now called Wasabi Technologies. The startup raised $8.2 million over two rounds in 2016 to get started.

Has Wasabi built a better mousetrap when people don't realize they have a mouse problem? Or, is this a real issue? Stu Minimansenior analyst, Wikibon

Wasabi added $10.8 million through a convertible note that will become equity when the company decides to raise a Series B round of funding. That will help finance the West Coast expansion to a colocation facility in San Jose, Calif., or Seattle, according to Friend. That would allow Wasabi to add automatic replication across multiple geographies for compliance, and to mitigate the risk of having all customer data in a single data center. Wasabi is also investigating expansion into Europe, a prospect that Friend said he hadn't planned to pursue until next year.

"I'm a cautious, conservative kind of guy, and I don't like just spending money without knowing what I'm going to get for it. But at this point in time, the market is almost limitless for this," Friend said. "Every day, new opportunities show up at the company for amounts of storage that are more than we had in our whole second-year projection. If any of these big deals start to come in our direction, it's going to be pretty impressive."

Friend said the speed at which Wasabi's software can read and write data is "what really blows people away." It offers performance that he said is generally achievable only at higher cost with on-premises data center hardware. He said the Wasabi software takes control of disk write heads and packs data onto storage drives more efficiently and at higher speed than Linux or Windows operating systems can.

"We get our speed by parallelizing. The speed comes from breaking the data up and reading it and writing it simultaneously to many drives at the same time," Friend said. He added that the data is distributed with sufficient redundancy to enable 11 nines of data durability, as Amazon does.

Friend said Wasabi keeps costs low by buying directly from hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers at about the same price as Amazon does in the low-margin HDD business. He said Wasabi's technology also enables longer disk life.

Wasabi charges a flat 0.39 cents per GB per month for storage and 4 cents per GB for egress. Competing public clouds vary prices based on the amount of data stored or transferred, the type of storage service -- such as cold or nearline -- and the requests made, such as puts and gets.

"Our vision is that cloud storage is going to become a commodity that's out there for everybody to use. You don't need three plugs in the wall for good electricity, so-so electricity and crappy but cheap electricity. You don't need all these different kinds of storage as well," Friend said.

Friend said he expects most potential customers to compare Wasabi to Amazon S3. But one trial participant, Phoenix-based WestStar Multimedia Entertainment Inc., pitted Wasabi against Amazon's colder, cheaper Glacier, Backblaze and Google Coldline in addition to Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure Backup and Rackspace.

WestStar vice president of information technology Chris Wojno said his company had a pressing need to back up more than 26 TB of video with an estimated data growth rate of 2.7 TB per month. WestStar produces The Kim Komando Show, a syndicated digital lifestyle radio program, and operates a multimedia website.

Wojno calculated costs based on storing 39 TB of data and found Wasabi had the lowest per-month price per GB. If he chose Wasabi, his per-month cost would be $3,747.90 less than Rackspace, $1,590.80 less than Azure Backup, and $744.90 less than Amazon S3. The price differential was far less over Google Coldline ($120.90), Backblaze ($42.90) and Glacier ($3.90), according to his spreadsheet analysis.

Wojno also weighed the data recovery cost for 39 TB of backed-up video in the event of a disaster. Backblaze was least expensive at $780, compared to $1,560 for Wasabi and $3,900 for Glacier. But Wojno figured Blackblaze's higher per-month storage fee than Wasabi would negate the savings.

Based on Wojno's calculations, WestStar selected Wasabi Technologies for cloud storage. Wojno admitted he would have been suspicious of the new company had he not been familiar with Friend through his work at Carbonite, a former sponsor of the radio show. Komando, an owner of WestStar, last month invested in Wasabi after her company became a paying customer.

Wojno said WestStar spent about two weeks backing up 26.5 TB of video over a 200 Mbps connection with backup software from Wasabi partner CloudBerry Lab. He noted that WestStar received a complimentary CloudBerry license for his participation in a webinar with the vendors.

Friend said migrating data through transfer to a storage appliance, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Snowball, and transport by truck to the cloud storage provider is "an idea whose time has come and gone."

"It's much cheaper to go and put in a 10 Gigabit [Ethernet] pipe for a month, move your data and then shut it off, assuming you're in a metropolitan area where such things are available," Friend said.

Stu Miniman, a senior analyst at Wikibon, said Wasabi faces a stiff challenge against Amazon, the clear No. 1 cloud storage player. He said Amazon could lower costs as it has done in the past, or improve performance to respond to any perceived threat. Plus, he hasn't heard many public cloud users complaining that storage is a problem.

"Has Wasabi built a better mousetrap when people don't realize they have a mouse problem? Or, is this a real issue?" Miniman said.

Miniman said users might look to the free 30-day trial for new applications. He said the question is how long they'll stick with the service over the long haul, especially if the initial application runs for only a limited time.

Friend said Wasabi Technologies is going after AWS customers who want to save money on their long-term data storage or keep a second copy of their data with a different cloud provider. Wasabi provides a free tool that customers can install in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to copy their S3-stored data to Wasabi automatically.

Friend said, thanks to Wasabi's S3 compatibility, organizations using EC2 to host applications could leave the applications there and move data to Wasabi's data center via Amazon's Direct Connect, rather than store it in Amazon S3. He said Wasabi does not compete against Amazon's Elastic Block Storage, which he said is designed for fast-moving data that doesn't stay in memory long.

Friend said Wasabi uses immutable buckets to protect data against accidental deletion, sabotage, viruses, malware, ransomware or other threats. Customers can specify the length of time they want a data bucket to be immutable.

Original post:
Wasabi Technologies takes on Amazon S3 on price, performance - TechTarget

SINGAPORE, Aug. 7, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Veritas Technologies, a leader in multi-cloud data management, today announced that Gartner, Inc. has named it a Leader in Gartner's 2017 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions 1. Veritas has been a Leader 15 consecutive times and since the inception of the report in 19992. Click here to download the full report.

Gartner's evaluation criteria for vendors includes completeness of vision and ability to execute. As the backup and recovery market has hundreds of vendors, this report narrows the focus down to those that have a very strong presence worldwide in the upper-end midmarket and large-enterprise environments.

"We are again honored to be named a Leader in this year's Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions," said Mike Palmer, executive vice president and chief product officer, Veritas. "As data continues to grow and become more fragmented across clouds and virtual environments, organizations need great performance with integrated backup and recovery to help reduce risks and boost productivity-- and at the same time, minimize storage costs. We believe this achievement underscores our commitment to offer comprehensive integrated enterprise data management-- both on premises and in the cloud."

Key innovations continue to differentiate Veritas, including:

According to the report, "Leaders have the highest combined measures of Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. They also have the most comprehensive and scalable product portfolios. They have a proven track record of established market presence and financial performance. For vision, they are perceived in the industry as thought leaders, and have well-articulated plans for enhancing recovery capabilities, improving ease of deployment and administration, and increasing their scalability and product breadth."

1 Source: Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backupand Recovery Solutions, Dave Russell, Pushan Rinnen, Robert Rhame, July 31, 2017

2 Previous titles include Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup Software and Integrated Appliances (2014-2015), Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery Software (2011-2013), Enterprise Backup and Restore Magic Quadrant (2001-2005), Enterprise Backup Vendor Magic Quadrant (1999-2000). In 2006 and 2008, Veritas Technologies was given a Positive and a Strong Positive designation in the MarketScope for Enterprise Backup/ Software. From 2005-2015, Veritas Technologies was known as Symantec.

Gartner Disclaimer

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Veritas Technologies

Veritas Technologies empowers businesses of all sizes to discover the truth in information -- their most important digital asset. Using the Veritas platform, customers can accelerate their digital transformation and solve pressing IT and business challenges including multi-cloud data management, data protection, storage optimization, compliance readiness and workload portability -- with no cloud vendor lock-in. Eighty-six percent of Fortune 500 companies rely on Veritas today to reveal data insights that drive competitive advantage. Learn more atwww.veritas.comor follow us on Twitter at @veritastechllc.

Forward-looking Statements:Any forward-looking indication of plans for products is preliminary and all future release dates are tentative and are subject to change at the sole discretion of Veritas. Any future release of the product or planned modifications to product capability, functionality, or feature are subject to ongoing evaluation by Veritas,may or may not be implemented, should not be considered firm commitments by Veritas,should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions, and may not be incorporated into any contract.

Veritas, the Veritas Logo, and Enterprise Vault are trademarks or registered trademarks of Veritas Technologies LLC or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Contacts

Belinda LimCorporate CommunicationsVeritas Technologies+65-6413-4306rel="nofollow">belinda.lim@veritas.com

Mizu Chitra / Marc LeeText100 Singapore+65-6603-9000rel="nofollow">veritas@text100.com.sg

Logo - http://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20150408/8521502200

SOURCE Veritas

Link:
Veritas Technologies Named a Leader in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery ... - Markets Insider

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Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrives privacy policies might make some users a bit nervous. Fortunately, there is another option: the privacy advocate MEGAs cloud storage and file sharing app. The app is currently available in open beta in Windows Store after being in closed beta.

The app provides you 50GB of free storage space and your data will be encrypted and decrypted by your client devices only, and never by the company itself. In other words, they never become aware of what your online archive contains.

You can upload your files from your smartphone or your tablet and search, store, download, stream, view, share, rename, and also delete your files. You will also be able to share folders with your contacts and check out their updates in real time.

Due to the fact that everything is encrypted with your own personal key, the company wont be able to reset your password. In case you lose it, you will also lose access to all your data, the hallmark of an actual secure device.

If you fill up your 50 GB, you will be able to upgrade your storage space and transfer quota with a monthly/yearly subscription. Here are the available options:

The pricing plans may vary according to on your country. Find the app in the Windows Store.

RELATED STORIES TO CHECK OUT:

Tags: cloud

Excerpt from:
MEGA Privacy brings 50GB of free cloud storage space to Windows 10 - Windows Report

"As flash proliferates as the de facto storage media for cloud infrastructure, adapting existing storage architectures to the cloud can be counterproductive," said Mike Heumann, Managing Partner, G2M Research. "Conventional AFAs and SDS appliances architectures can bring significant performance inefficiencies and costs to cloud environments. Attala Systems' combination of an FPGA-based solution and self-learning orchestration and provisioning capabilities, has the potential to remove many of the inefficiencies of conventional storage architectures."

Operators of cloud-based storage and real-time analytic systems are always seeking new ways to scale their infrastructure to support more clients, transactions or revenue-generating services, while providing superior performance, agility and reduced operational costs. A flexible data networking infrastructure, combined with automated provisioning and orchestration, significantly reduces TCO and operational costs. Attala Systems end-to-end solution utilizes FPGA-based hardware to accomplish these goals, and is purpose-built for cloud storage infrastructure. By being an end-to-end system, it also avoids the "DIY" performance and deployment risks associated with 3rd party/open-source software based solutions. The result is an adaptable storage infrastructure that is essentially an elastic block storage (EBS) solution "on steroids".

"We are excited to be working with Attala Systems," said Dan McNamara, Corporate VP of the Programmable Solutions Group at Intel. "Intel FPGAs are enabling the next-level of capability for cloud and Enterprise infrastructure. By taking advantage of the flexibility of Intel FPGAs to accelerate networked NVMe performance and automation, Attala Systems is providing new and significant capabilities to cloud storage operators."

Attala Systems executives have a proven track record of creating and commercializing disruptive data center technologies. They include Sujith Arramreddy, Taufik Ma, and Sai Gadiraju. Sujith was a cofounder of both ServerWorks and ServerEngines, where he architected entire product lines and helped drive the acquisition of those companies by larger established companies. Taufik was one of the key executives responsible for the growth of Intel's CPU and chipset business, and helped drive Aarohi Communications and Emulex to success as a marketing and product management executive. Sai was a cofounder of ServerWorks and ServerEngines, where he was an engineering and operations executive responsible for developing and commercializing dozens of product lines over his career. Rounding out Attala Systems is an advisory board consisting of Jay Kidd (SVP and CTO roles at NetApp and Brocade) and Chris McBride (multiple customer-facing executive roles at Baffle, BlueArc, McData, Hitachi Data Systems, and other companies).

"Our focus from the ground up has been on designing and building a cloud-optimized storage infrastructure," said Taufik Ma, co-founder at Attala Systems. "In discussions with our customers, the need to build storage differently than it has been done in enterprises always comes across unambiguously. This is why companies such as Microsoft and Amazon opted for brand new approaches. Our architecture, developed with help from Intel's Programmable Solutions Group, is the realization of that need."

Please come by and visit Attala Systems in Booth 848 at the Flash Memory Summit, August 8th-10th, 2017 in the Santa Clara CA Convention Center.

About Attala SystemsFounded in 2015 with headquarters in San Jose, Calif., Attala Systems is an early-stage technology company focused on the design and development of a new generation of storage and networking infrastructure based on the use of FPGAs and cloud-focused self-learning orchestration and provisioning software. By freeing storage architectures from the multiple levels of abstraction inherent in enterprise-based storage systems, Attala significantly improves system performance and reduces operational costs for cloud providers and those with a need for high-performance, low latency storage systems.

Press/Media/Analyst Contact: G2M Communicationsmedia_relations@g2minc.comTelephone: 858-610-9708

View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/attala-systems-announces-its-high-performance-composable-storage-infrastructure-technology-for-cloud-and-analytics-300498775.html

SOURCE Attala Systems

See original here:
Attala Systems Announces Its High Performance Composable Storage Infrastructure Technology for Cloud and Analytics - PR Newswire (press release)