Category Archives: Cloud Storage
Massive data centers store info "on the cloud" but at what cost? – My Fox Boston
Updated: May 9, 2017 - 11:48 PM
BOSTON - All of your music, photos and videos are probably saved "up in the cloud" instead of your phone for safekeeping -- but the cloud is actually made up of huge data centers.
Some critics claim it has a dark lining, thanks to the massive amount of power required. Boston 25 News reporter Ted Daniel shows us what really goes into maintaining all that data.
Massive data centers like Microsofts buildings in Quincy, Washington have transformed the landscape. The data centers are the engine or brain of a company. Inside, a large group of connected servers store, process, and distribute all of the things we access online.
Supporters say they brought a financial windfall in the form of jobs, and a surge in real estate. But critics say the data centers are adding something else to the air, thanks to the diesel generators, designed to make sure that the power never goes out.
When they start up, without controls, they give that black puff. And that was never considered in the air quality permits until we got involved. You can still see it, said former Quincy mayor Patty Martin.
There are an estimated 3 million data centers in the U.S. alone. That's about one for every 100 people in the country.
One of the largest in New England is located above the Macy's building in Bostons Downtown Crossing. The 920,000 square foot facility stores data for financial, healthcare, bio-tech, and entertainment companies - plus information for the the government
We dont see an end in sight with respect to having new data centers coming online, said Vanderweil Engineers principal Jim Gikas.
The leading data management design firm says data centers need an enormous amount of power, in part, because they operate 24 hours a day, require precise temperatures, and lots of redundancy.
Data centers use 20-100+ times the amount of electrical energy used in office building, said Gikas.
At Vanderweil, engineers are focused are trying to find ways to reduce the power draw and make data storage more environmentally friendly. We do have to be sensitive and really creative in helping people optimize the energy use, said Vanderweils Mike Kerwin.
In Massachusetts, data centers are also located in Watertown, Bedford, Worcester, Needham and Chicopee.
2017 Cox Media Group.
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Massive data centers store info "on the cloud" but at what cost? - My Fox Boston
eMusic Relaunches Indie Focused Music Hub with Free, Discounted Downloads, Cloud Storage – hypebot.com
A pioneer in digital music, eMusic has relaunched with an indie focus similar to its early days. TriPlay acquired eMusic in September of 2015 and has rebuilt the platform from the ground up.
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eMusic has been resurrected as a home for the indie music aficionado with free cloud storage for existing music collections and a catalog of 32 million tracks available for download at at up to 55% off retail.
In an age of streaming, its decidedly risky yet artist and indie label friendly approach. "eMusic is for fans who value ownership of music at a competitive price," says the company, "while knowing they are also fairly supporting musicians and songwriters."
In addition discounted tracks, a free cloud music locker and player apps anchor the new eMusic. Free users get "anywhere access" to their music collection with unlimited cloud storage, plus a free daily music download from an emerging artist. Paid plans start at $3.99 per month, with unlimited access to songs at up to 55% off retail, and range up to $29.99 per month, for the "music connoisseur."
Analysis
eMusic's indie focus will be frustrating for many fans.
Even those who consume mostly indie music, occasionally want the hits. The latest Drake release on the site was from 2005, for example; and indie labels may be hesitant to deep discount their own hit tracks. As for cloud storage, Amazon and Apple both offer affordable music lockers.
Still, the new service stands a chance if it can become an indie music hub, like the original site was. That is clearly its intent. "eMusic Members have spent countless hours growing and curating their private music libraries and see value in the power of their personal cloud througheMusic," insistsTamir Koch, CEO of eMusic owner TriPlay. "In fact, when eMusic Members listen to music, 80% of the time they are listening to their own music collections. We are proud to give our Members an easy, convenient and affordable platform that allows them to expand their collections and access their music from anywhere."
Add more curation, editorial, fan comments and access (even without discounts) to more music, and eMusic could become a home for indie music fans and a boon to indie artists and labels.
Key Features
Some of the features available in the new eMusic include:
Music gives its users a variety of service level options:
Enjoy 1TB of safe & reliable cloud storage with Zoolz [DEALS] – Android Community
Want to keep your data safe for all eternity? Get as close as possible with a lifetime of Zoolz Dual Cloud 1TB Storage, offered to Android Community readers at over 90% off the retail price. Cloud storage services are an effective way to backup your files and safeguard them from things like computer crashes. While thats great, most people still dont use cloud based storage because it can be prohibitively expensive year after year and you never know if security measures are kept up to date.
Zoolz Dual Cloud 1TB Storage, however, is different. You pay once and once only for the service and then its yours for life. Youll never receive a subscription renewal notice and youll certainly never have to pay again to continue using it. Just backup your files and retrieve them as needed.
Of course, security is a big concern with online-based file storage and for good reason. Theres a lot of bad guys out there that would love the opportunity to steal your data and identity. With Zoolz Dual Cloud 1TB Storage, though, your information is kept lock tight. They use military grade 256-AES encryption to start protecting your files before they even leave your computer, for the safest cloud storage experience around.
With a lifetime subscription, youll receive 1TB of space with which to store all your documents, photos, music, videos, and more. Its simple to setup and even easier to use. And it even works across devices, so you can transfer a file from an Android smartphone to a Windows PC or even an iPad if you wanted to.
Its easier than ever to backup your data to the cloud. A lifetime subscription to Zoolz Dual Cloud 1TB Storage is just $29.99 this week at Android Community Deals.
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Enjoy 1TB of safe & reliable cloud storage with Zoolz [DEALS] - Android Community
Poll: Is cloud storage enough to compensate for less onboard storage – MobileSyrup
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Poll: Is cloud storage enough to compensate for less onboard storage - MobileSyrup
Enterprise cloud storage boosted by Oracle Cloud Converged Storage – TechTarget
True hybrid enterprise cloud storage systems promise the best of both on-premises infrastructure and public cloud. They offer the performance, security and governance of local storage necessary for many mission-critical business applications -- not to mention the on-demand elastic scalability and utility economics of public clouds.
But finding true hybrid cloud tools to support critical, enterprise-class, database-driven applications can be difficult. This gaping hole in the market has left enterprise IT pros and business application owners stuck on legacy infrastructures.
However, there has been significant progress. Oracle Cloud Converged Storage, released last month, integrates storage services across its database, enterprise applications, enterprise storage infrastructure and public cloud. Practically, its latest on-premises Oracle ZFS storage arrays internally and organically extend into public Oracle Cloud storage (which is also made up of ZFS storage arrays) -- no gateway integration or third-party software required.
Oracle Cloud Converged Storage looks like what many of us thought hybrid storage was supposed to look like. Yet, no high-performance, enterprise storage system has ever actually delivered a true native hybrid cloud capability. Why haven't other vendors, such as IBM and Dell EMC, offered hybrid cloud storage to leverage their enterprise storage and cloud tools? Those vendors require a hardware or software gateway to move data to the public cloud, unlike Oracle, which doesn't require one.
This failure to deliver what customers really want may be due to internal competition between legacy infrastructure and separately managed cloud divisions. Large storage vendors' revenue and profits have declined the past few years, due to factors such as the cloud, hyper-convergence and more software-defined products, a driving force behind Dell's EMC acquisition.
When enterprises want to evolve legacy architectures into modern hybrid storage, they simply don't want to deal with large bundles or bunches of parts and disparate cloud services that require integration. In a way, this is also about recognizing the market trend of how enterprises seek more convenient converged products in all their IT transformation projects.
True hybrid cloud storage should be simple to own and operate. Simplicity in IT inevitably leads to a lower total cost of ownership and lower risk, whereas complexity always increases implementation overhead, ongoing management costs and lowers service levels. While there are older approaches to hybridized storage services with external cloud gateway products, colocating private storage with public clouds (e.g., NetApp Private Storage) or accelerating data transfer (e.g., Attunity CloudBeam), these all add layers of technology and cause additional burdens to enterprises and database owners and operators.
The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance is based on Oracle's improved version of ZFS, originally inherited through the acquisition of Sun Microsystems and highly augmented over the years. It provides the high-performance, availability and enterprise features that IT looks for in production data center storage.
This latest release is inherently cloud-enabled, with native (and fully configurable) tiering to the public Oracle Cloud.
The Oracle Cloud is becoming quite popular with application owners and Oracle database administrators who find that it is a natural (and low-risk) public cloud option for Oracle database cloud services. Once storage appliances are brought into an enterprise, many IT storage domain admins find it attractive for general workloads too, offering better price and performance compared to aging legacy network-attached storage systems.
There have also been absolute horror stories from enterprises that have tried to stitch together disparate on-premises storage, cloud gateways and general public cloud providers. The number of complex cross-vendor interactions, the amount of finger-pointing between vendors and the sheer frustration of trying to troubleshoot remote service interactions on a public cloud (with someone who isn't an expert on your exact workload) has kept many from leveraging hybrid cloud opportunities in general, much less for enterprise database-driven applications.
With Oracle Cloud Converged Storage, enterprises need only make one phone call to Oracle support to find and fix issues anywhere in the end-to-end hybrid platform.
Oracle Cloud Converged Storage is relatively low risk because Oracle's cloud storage is actually made up of Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances. So, the same storage that runs on customers' premises, runs in Oracle's public cloud. In fact, Oracle field tests all its beta storage releases in its own cloud first, at great scales that dwarf any individual enterprise (600 petabytes+ and growing fast). Not only does having the same physical storage on both sides of the hybrid cloud connection eliminate a whole raft of potential incompatibility issues, but problems that might arise become much simpler to solve.
For those seeking the benefits of true hybrid cloud storage, it's time to tell your storage vendor that you want fully cloud converged infrastructure, and not some complex amalgamation.
The Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance
Oracle cloud aims to coexist with on premises
A hybrid push from Oracle
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Enterprise cloud storage boosted by Oracle Cloud Converged Storage - TechTarget
Use the cloud to enhance the functions of primary storage – TechTarget
IT managers viewed cloud storage skeptically or as a threat when services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service...
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and Elastic Block Store started appearing a little over a decade ago. As the logic went, the cloud might serve archiving needs, but I sure wouldn't trust placing primary data there due to security, availability and performance concerns.
Today, cloud storage's potential to enhance on-premises deployments is no longer disputable. And while the industry has yet to resolve all the issues that make IT managers uncomfortable, cloud technology security has made solid progress -- notwithstanding the operator error that took down Amazon S3 for a few hours in February.
Maturation has enabled the cloud to become a favorite target for secondary and tertiary data through a growing array of backup, disaster recovery and archiving services. And, increasingly, we're using cloud storage to enhance the functions of primary storage as a tier in the storage hierarchy.
Tiering provides a way to balance storage performance, space and cost requirements of different applications. Data is assigned to different storage classes, based on frequency of access and related factors and then placed on the media that best matches the requirements for that class of storage.
Storage tiering technology has become highly automated, with data placement decisions based on a set of policies, enabling companies to create a hybrid storage architecture, which can span media in the data center and across one or more providers' clouds (see "Evolution of storage tiering technologies").
Recent Taneja Group research suggested more than 60% of IT practitioners either already use or plan to use some form of storage tiering. Two-thirds, meanwhile, have extended storage tiers to the public cloud for at least some critical workloads. The cloud will likely play a larger role in tiering going forward.
Vendors have introduced products that move data out of primary storage as it becomes cold or inactive. Unlike traditional local storage tiering, the newest products permit tiering to the public cloud for greater scalability and more cost-effective use of storage overall.
Most products are automated and allow you to set policies that govern data migration based on frequency of access, age or other factors. All complement and enhance the functions of primary storage.
Products that facilitate the cloud as a separate primary block or file storage tier fall into two major categories: cloud storage gateways and software-defined storage-based offerings.
Cloud storage gateways have come a long way since their 2010 introduction. They've also gone through several naming iterations and may be referred to as cloud controllers, cloud-integrated storage, cloud-caching appliances or other terms.
Originally focused on low-cost cloud backup or archive, storage gateways now address several different primary and secondary storage use cases, including file sync and sharing, collaboration, cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) for recovery in the cloud or on premises, and in-cloud data analytics, in addition to front ends for scale-out NAS in the cloud.
Cloud storage gateways appear as traditional arrays to workloads, but function as high-performance local caches or tiers in front of cloud capacity on the back end, generally as highly scalable object storage. They automatically translate file or block protocols into object protocols. That allows existing apps running on premises to benefit from cloud storage scalability and resiliency without the burden and complexity of integrating legacy storage into the cloud. Gateways come as physical or virtual appliances, and can replace traditional block or file storage systems when storage is built-in.
Cloud storage gateways that handle primary storage commonly include flash-based caching and, in a few cases, primary storage tiers. Though vendor caching algorithms vary, most dynamically store frequently accessed data in flash cache on an ongoing basis, ensuring critical on-premises apps meet performance objectives while translating file or block protocols into object storage in the background. Local pinning prevents the flushing of critical data from the local cache or storage tier.
Look for cloud storage gateways that enable cache to be dynamically resized so it's better tuned to requirements of specific use cases. A cache supporting functions of primary storage might be sized to capture 100% of data stored in the cloud, but you may size your cache that supports archive storage to contain small fractions of cloud data. Some also let you size and assign individual caches to different data sets to support varying performance needs and use cases.
Gateways dedicated to archiving cold or inactive data also benefit primary storage by freeing up on-premises performance and capacity resources so they're used more productively to benefit primary workloads.
Gateway products should also include data reduction such as deduplication or compression to minimize the impact on network performance and to reduce the capacity and cost of data stored in the cloud. Look for products that support deduplication and compression for specific applications, since not all workloads will benefit equally. They should also provide encryption for data at rest and in motion, and support space-efficient snapshots and cloning locally and in the cloud to ensure data's protected. Also ask about directory technologies such as Active Directory or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to verify full integration into your current environment.
Check out cloud storage gateway offerings from vendors such as Microsoft (Azure StorSimple) and Dell EMC (CloudArray) to support a variety of primary storage use cases, such as collaboration, databases or virtual machines. If you're looking for a more cost-effective scale-out NAS, look at offerings from Panzura and Nasuni. And to consolidate remote office/branch office infrastructure, consider a gateway appliance from Ctera Networks, which can serve as a front-line array to replace local primary storage in ROBO deployments.
Words of caution: Qualify cloud storage gateways for specific functions of primary storage upfront to ensure they meet latency and IOPS objectives for applications you have in mind. Also, choose a storage gateway that can access multiple cloud providers, both to avoid potential lock-in and enable choosing the provider that best meets the needs of particular workloads.
Cloud storage gateways may allow moving storage to the cloud, but they always assume applications remain running on premises. A new wave of software-defined storage (SDS) products promises to take things a step further by seamlessly transferring primary storage workloads between the data center and the cloud. While these are in early stages of adoption, we at Taneja Group believe they have merit, given the desire to more fully take advantage of the scalability, resilience and agility of the public cloud.
Vendors take two architectural approaches to make this happen: (a) using a distributed, platform-agnostic storage plane to create a single logical pool of storage that spans on premises and cloud and (b) enabling storage volumes to run as a service alongside public cloud compute.
Of course, if you're using object storage in the data center to support primary workloads, and it happens to be compatible with one or more public cloud storage services, such as Amazon S3, then you likely already have an easy way to migrate primary storage workloads into and out of the cloud. Achieving this for primary block and file storage is much tougher, but we expect that'll begin to change by next year.
Because these new emerging technologies primarily focus on nonproduction use cases, such as enabling cloud-based DR or data analytics, and given their relative immaturity, evaluate them thoroughly -- on paper and with hands-on testing -- to determine if and how they can help enhance your primary storage workloads.
Cloud storage that complements or enhances primary storage should meet your needs in each of the following areas:
Accessibility: How broadly accessible must cloud-resident data be, given your primary storage use cases? For example, file sync and sharing and collaboration require access from almost anywhere, whereas analytics workloads may only require accessibility from the data center.
Security: Most cloud gateways and newer software-based hybrid storage products and services encrypt data at rest and in flight, but underlying technologies can vary. Also, verify how you'll manage and control keys -- whether they're generated by you or the vendor -- and ensure they're adequately protected.
Avoid lock-in: Still a real possibility for single-provider platforms such as Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway. You must demand support for multiple public clouds and cost-effective data migration out of the cloud should you decide to switch providers.
Data center to cloud network capabilities: Evaluate network availability and performance requirements, and make sure your network provides the redundancy, connectivity and bandwidth necessary. Check whether the vendor offers deduplication or compression to reduce bandwidth usage and costs.
Application performance: Scope out latency, IOPS and other performance requirements based on the use cases and workloads you plan to run. Once you've qualified these against an offering's specifications, insist on hands-on testing or proof-of-concept exercises to validate performance meets expectations.
Costs: Given its extreme scalability and ease of use, cloud storage can become habit-forming, and the costs of storing and accessing data there can grow quickly. Estimate monthly storage costs for potential public cloud providers ahead of time, using their cost calculators where available, and review monthly bills to ensure estimates are in range. In addition, look for tools that help allocate and manage costs.
Until recently, cloud storage was largely the domain of developers, who benefited from ease of use and pay-as-you-go accessibility of object storage services. But the advent of cloud storage gateways and some emerging hybrid cloud software technologies has changed that, enabling storage admins to make productive use of cloud storage for primary workloads.
If you believe that at least some of your tier-two or tier-one workloads could benefit from the scalability, resilience and broad accessibility public cloud offers, take a closer look at the tiering and other storage products and services outlined here. They may prove a fast and easy onramp to the cloud for one or more of your key use cases.
Three ways hybrid cloud can improve storage performance
Customers use cloud to boost data storage infrastructure
Storage CTOs see bright future in cloud
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Use the cloud to enhance the functions of primary storage - TechTarget
Public Cloud Storage ‘Revolution’: 80% Price Cut, 6X Performance … – EnterpriseTech
(Bedrin/Shutterstock)
A revolution in public cloud storage price/performance could be in the offing as two storage industry veterans with a track record of disruption today launched a new company that they say cuts pricing for storage in the AWS compute environment by 80 percent with a 6X performance jump.
The new company, Wasabi, targets S3, the storage tier within public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services. The startup is intended to follow in the footsteps of Carbonite, the company founded by David Friend and Jeff Flowers in 2006 that overturned the consumer backup storage industry with its fixed price model and quickly became market dominant. Friend, Flowers and 18 other former Carbonite developers have worked on the Wasabi project for more than two years.
Our vision is that cloud storage ought to be a commodity, like electricity its just there, Friend told EnterpriseTech. All you need is one size, you dont need all these crazy tiers, because were faster than the fastest and cheaper than the cheapest, all at the same time.
Wasabi is hot pluggable with the AWS ecosystem even as it seeks to replace S3 as AWS customers storage technology of choice. Available now, Wasabi is offered as object cloud storage-as-a-service connected via the S3 API to AWS. Under its pricing model, Wasabi unlike AWS does not charge for moving or retrieving data to and from AWS compute.
Source: Wasabi
Targeting enterprises with large data volumes, Wasabis price and performance advantages grow as customers data stores grow, Friend said. The annual cost of a petabyte of data stored using Wasabi is $46,800, compared with $276,000 on S3, $249,600 on Microsoft Azure and $240,000 on Google Cloud Platform, according to Wasabi.
As for performance, Wasabi claims sustained read performance of 1300 megabytes per second against S3s 191 MB/second; Wasabi claims sustained write of 563 MB/second against S3s 90 MB/second.
Source: Wasabi
We dont like vendor lock in, Friend said, we just want people to go to the best value and the best performance. The story is pretty simple: if you know S3 then you know what Wasabi is. The only difference is that its one fifth the price and six times faster.
Todays announcement has grabbed the attention of industry analysts while also generating some degree of skepticism.
The first thing you think when someone says theyre going to go toe-to-toe with Amazon is, Yeah, right! Steve Hill, senior analyst, 451 Research, told EnterpriseTech. Trying to out-Amazon Amazon is a dangerous and almost futile attempt, really.
But the companys Carbonite roots give the new company credibility, Hill said.
Obviously, Im skeptical of everything, he said. And I have no doubt if theyre promising this kind of performance at that price they should be able to deliver it. This is not a new company, theyve been doing this via Carbonite, so they really understand the storage industry.
The upshot, assuming Wasabi delivers on its price/performance promises: We may be at an inflection point where theyre revolutionizing the pricing model for cloud storage, said Hill. It certainly offers that potential.
Andrew Smith, IDC, senior research analyst - storage software, told EnterpriseTech, I think its legitimate. Its an area where there hasnt been as much competition as there could have been. Object storage went cold for a little while but now its getting more attention. Organizations have been better at applying it to a wider range of use cases. Theres still things in high transactional data that object storage cant touch, but its applicability is widening, and Wasabi has found a way to make it even more cost effective, so its going to be a good message to customers.
In targeting companies that need to store hundreds of terabytes of data, Wasabi is addressing a growing market need. Theyre offering the lowest cost at the highest capacity of storage, to compound costs savings, Smith said. A high amount of storage at longer time frames, thats where Wasabis cost proposition only gets better over time.
I think there will be plenty of demand for that type of storage increasingly demand, he said. The trends we continue to see the incredible volumes of data, the increasing value of data. Customers are looking to get not only the cheapest storage but also the best access to that type of info and to be able to utilize it in different ways. So this is a good foot in the door for Wasabi.
BlueArchive had been the new ventures code name, Friend said, a name deliberately chosen to throw off anyone trying to find out what he, Flowers and a team of other former Carbonite employees were developing under wraps.
We named the company Wasabi because its hot hot storage, Friend said. BlueArchive was only the stealth name, a decoy, to make people think we were going to do something kind of offline and cold. And thats obviously not what we were up to.
Wasabi has raised $8.5 million in a Series A round and is backed by Desh Deshpande, Bill Sahlam, Ron Skates and Jeff Parker, among other investors, according to the company. Friend, Flowers and their team began work on Wasabi in 2014.
Pressed for details on Wasabis technology strategy, Friend demurred, citing reluctance to reveal competitive advantage.
I cant tell you a lot, he said. What I can tell you is all our storage is disk-based, so most of our expenses are buying raw disks. But its the software, the file system. Wasabi storage technology does not focus on the operating system, Friend said. If you write a file on your own computer, its Windows or Linux or whatever operating system that controls what actually physically happens on the disk. We dont use any of that. We go right down to controlling the movement of the heads on the disk drives themselves.
There are a lot of things you can do if you know how to get down to that very low level code, he said. Its a very arcane part of computer science. Very few people ever bother with it because they rely on Windows or Linuxto worry about such things. But if you know specifically what youre going to be doing, being able to take control at that level gives you the ability to do a lot of things that save 20 percent here, 30 percent there, 8 percent somewhere else. Theres a long list of tricks weve learned over the years that allow us to sell at one-fifth of Amazons prices and still make pretty decent gross margins.
Wasabis first data center is collocated with AWS in Ashburn, VA, which has become a data center mecca. Sharing the same site with Amazon means faster connectivity between Wasabi storage and AWS compute, Friend said. Additional data centers in others parts of the U.S. will follow to meet customer demand.
I dont know how many data centers there are in Ashburn, there must be dozens, Friend said, and theyre all on this metro fiber loop. What it means is youve got a highly competitive situation, which is good for everybody, certainly good for us, because we can be in any of those data centers and get extremely inexpensive and extremely high bandwidth connections to any other one. So if we run out of space in one data center we just start filling up at another one its as though theyre all in one room. We can buy dark fiber down there between data centers and its crazy cheap.
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Public Cloud Storage 'Revolution': 80% Price Cut, 6X Performance ... - EnterpriseTech
SoftNAS, Talon Think Global, Act Local in Cloud Storage – DABCC.com
SoftNAS, which makes a software-defined cloud network attached storage system for midrange-size companies, has solved a problem for many smaller IT shops: Those who are used to a data center NAS or a SAN (storage area network) and are coming to cloud environments and finding that those conventional functions are nowhere to be found.
To take this transition up a notch for those struggling to implement global systems, Houston-based SoftNAS announced May 2 that it has joined forces with Talon, a Mount Laurel, N.J.-based provider of enterprise-class file-sharing software for distributed locations, to enable global storage consolidation into an enterprise cloud.
The combination of Talon FAST and the SoftNAS Cloud NAS provides joint customers with an alternative central cloud-based storage namespace that is secure, highly resilient and can grow on-demand, Michael Richtberg, SoftNAS Vice-President of Business Development, told eWEEK.
The new integrated solution, available May 2, enables high-performance global file locking, file access and sharing for all users across a global enterprise, Richtberg said.
Read the entire article here, SoftNAS, Talon Think Global, Act Local in Cloud Storage
via the fine folks at SoftNAS
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SoftNAS, Talon Think Global, Act Local in Cloud Storage - DABCC.com
Talon and SoftNAS Partner to Provide Consolidated Global Cloud … – DABCC.com
Talon, the leading provider of enterprise class file sharing solutions for distributed locations, today announced its strategic partnership with SoftNAS, the #1 best-selling software-defined cloud NAS, to enable true global storage consolidation into the enterprise cloud. Talon FAST and SoftNAS Cloud NAS provide joint customers with a central cloud-based storage namespace that is secure, highly resilient, and can grow on-demand, ensuring high performance global file locking, file access and sharing for all users across the global enterprise.
Global enterprises are increasingly looking for opportunities to leverage the scale and flexibility of the cloud, and one of the key targets for exploitation remains unstructured data stores. The combination of Talon and SoftNAS offerings deliver a petabyte scale topology for distributed file servers to be consolidated into limitless, highly-available cloud storage, reducing both cost and risk while increasing business agility.
Talon FAST enables a global fabric, which gives virtually any enterprise location the ability to seamlessly access and use cloud-resident file shares as they traditionally have on-premises file servers, without changing user experience or workflow. The combination of a powerful distributed network file system, intelligent caching and global locking allows globally distributed enterprises to operate under a central storage system view while keeping the storage centralized and lightweight at the edge. This ability to centralize data has large benefits as enterprises decommission costly-to-maintain file servers around the globe. Talon FAST optimizes the flow of information in the enterprise, enabling all offices to work off the same set of data.
SoftNAS Cloud NAS presents virtually limitless, highly resilient data shares in the enterprise cloud, allowing seamless data access to existing applications without requiring application rewrites. SoftNAS gives its customers the enterprise-class data security, protection, and performance required to safely, predictably, and reliably operate IT systems and applications. Under this partnership, Talon FAST users will utilize the capabilities of SoftNAS Cloud filer as the main repository for unstructured data in the cloud.
As enterprises move from an on-premises to a cloud-first strategy, key goals that we see include ensuring that applications dont need to change prematurely, that users arent negatively impacted, and that they have the levels of security and scale needed to grow, stated William Fellows, VP of Research, 451 Research. The combination of Talon and SoftNAS targets those objectives directly.
The Talon and SoftNAS collaboration can provide organizations with a single software-defined storage footprint, versus the legacy distributed storage architecture which requires localized management, backup, security, and audit for the proprietary hardware footprint in each location.
Customers want a software-based solution that bridges the cloud and premises storage gaps, delivering efficient, global access to an extensible namespace that scales into the petabytes, while leveraging the low costs and high durability of cloud storage, stated Rick Braddy, CEO, CTO and Founder of SoftNAS. The alliance with Talon allows our customers to fully leverage our HA cloud NAS across the broader enterprise, bridging the long tail of IT with the new cloud frontier.
Customers with globally distributed locations will benefit significantly from having a central point of storage management and control, said Shirish Phatak, CEO, Talon. Partnering with SoftNAS provides us with an additional tool in our toolkit for offering a powerful, efficient and scalable storage management solution.
Talon FAST is available as a site based annual subscription or as a joint offering with Microsoft Azure Storage and Hybrid Cloud solutions in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
SoftNAS is available as an annual subscription and on-demand in Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS.
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About Talon
Talon, a leader in next generation software-defined storage solutions, enables enterprises to centralize and consolidate IT storage infrastructure, while bringing data closer to their users, enabling enterprise global file sharing and collaboration. This results in streamlined IT management and improved end user productivity. From its headquarters in Mount Laurel, NJ and its global locations, Talon serves the largest Global 2000 organizations including the most established Architectural, Construction, Engineering, Energy, Offshore and Manufacturing companies.
Talon FAST is a trademark of Talon Storage Solutions, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
About SoftNAS
SoftNAS, Inc. is the leading provider of software-defined NAS solutions and protects mission-critical data for customers using any combination of public, private and hybrid clouds. SoftNAS gives its customers the enterprise-class data security, protection, and performance required to safely, predictably, and reliably operate IT systems and applications. SoftNAS believes in powerful, hassle-free data management and works with any hardware, any data type, across any geography, and with any IT environment, including the most popular public, private, and hybrid cloud computing platforms: Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, CenturyLink Cloud and VMware vSphere.
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Talon and SoftNAS Partner to Provide Consolidated Global Cloud ... - DABCC.com
Public Cloud Storage ‘Revolution’: 80% Price Cut, 6X Performance … – Datanami
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A revolution in public cloud storage price/performance could be in the offing as two storage industry veterans with a track record of disruption today launched a new company that they say cuts pricing for storage in the AWS compute environment by 80 percent with a 6X performance jump.
The new company, Wasabi, targets S3, the storage tier within public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services. The startup is intended to follow in the footsteps of Carbonite, the company founded by David Friend and Jeff Flowers in 2006 that overturned the consumer backup storage industry with its fixed price model and quickly became market dominant. Friend, Flowers and 18 other former Carbonite developers have worked on the Wasabi project for more than two years.
Our vision is that cloud storage ought to be a commodity, like electricity its just there, Friend told EnterpriseTech. All you need is one size, you dont need all these crazy tiers, because were faster than the fastest and cheaper than the cheapest, all at the same time.
Wasabi is hot pluggable with the AWS ecosystem even as it seeks to replace S3 as AWS customers storage technology of choice. Available now, Wasabi is offered as object cloud storage-as-a-service connected via the S3 API to AWS. Under its pricing model, Wasabi unlike AWS a does not charge for moving or retrieving data to and from AWS compute.
Please read the rest of the article at EnterpriseTech.
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Public Cloud Storage 'Revolution': 80% Price Cut, 6X Performance ... - Datanami