Cleversafe, already in the business it calls “unlimited storage” has a new data center partner to make that dream come true.
In fact, Cleversafe was intelligent enough to hook up with data center services company Datatility and together the two built Hydra Cloud. As with the multi-headed Lernaean Hydra from Greek mythology, this cloud is multi-functional.
The services, although based on Cleversafe, are delivered via Datatility.
One trick Cleversafe apparently has up its sleeve is the use of object storage, upon which Datatility has built a brand new business, one aimed at the unceasing rise of unstructured data, and making all this easier to manage via the cloud.
“This newly launched Multi-functional Cloud Storage Platform, based on Cleversafe’s patented Dispersed Storage Network (dsNet) technology, provides Datatility customers with a tiered public cloud storage solution to best align storage needs with operating costs,” the partners said.
Gartner is one of many research houses tracking the cloud storage market, and did so in its recent Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2017, 1Q13 Update report. The research shows that “worldwide Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS) Storage for end-user spending to grow at a 31 percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), from an estimated $1.7B in 2013 to a forecast $4.9B in 2017.”
The two partners further argue that with storage growing 10 times every five years, the only effective way out is the cloud. On-premises is too much to manage, has to be rebuilt to scale, and costs way too much money.
Datatility talked to its customers, and some 80 percent of their data, held in primary as opposed to cloud storage, was barely used, and not even accessed for last two months. This is the storage that costs the most. Primary and active storage, usually on-premises, costs a lot to buy and a multitude more to manage.
“Within the data center environment the storage of older data is a huge issue,” said Jan Rosenberg, CEO of Datatility. “With data growth expanding 10x every five years, traditional storage architectures are just not a viable option any longer. They can’t scale and they’re too expensive,” said Rosenberg.
The new service took a lot of mutual work. “Datatility’s multi-tenant approach required us to do a few things differently. We worked hand-in-hand with them every step of the way as they developed a completely new business model to meet the needs of customers that were feeling the pressure of unstructured data growth but couldn’t access the cloud in a way that was effective, efficient or affordable,” said Russ Kennedy, Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Customer Solutions for Cleversafe. “Together, we enabled efficient storage tiering, low total cost of ownership and multi-functional data center features.”
Where Object Storage Came From
This MSP Today scribe is old enough to remember how databases were in the 80’s, but fortunately not so old as to have forgotten.
DBMS systems held records as numbers, names, etc. -- all in character and text form. And they were either flat file-based or relational – the later largely using the rows and columns metaphor.
Look around today. How much of our data is names and numbers? Today we have documents, images, video, rich formats – data is no longer abstracted as numbers, but truly represents itself – as those documents, images, and video themselves.
That is where databases for unstructured data and object databases all came from.
Object storage is on the move, or so says IDC. “The worldwide file- and object-based storage (FOBS) market continues to gain momentum with revenues exceeding $23 billion in 2013 and forecast to reach $38 billion in 2017,” the research house says.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
