Cloud Cornerstones: 19 New Ways To Connect Storage To AWS

The Storage Factor For AWS Environments

The cloud storage market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of nearly 30 percent through 2022 to reach a total market size of $92.5 billion, up from $25.2 billion in 2017, according to research firm Research and Markets. That will continue to push storage vendors to find better ways to connect their on-premises offerings to the cloud.

Many vendors are doing just that. These 19 storage vendors, both hardware- and software-focused, in the last half-year or so have introduced new ways to connect their wares to Amazon Web Services or otherwise take advantage of AWS' hyper-scale capabilities.

Here's how these vendors are helping partners connect storage to AWS.

Barracuda Backup, AWS Replication

Barracuda Backup is an integrated end-to-end offering that gives customers, solution providers and MSPs the ability to replicate to their own AWS S3 bucket. It can also replicate data to the Barracuda Cloud.This lets customers choose where their data resides while also providing them with control over their replicated backup data. Barracuda, Campbell, Calif., deploys infrastructure in AWS to provide an end-to-end offering to customers for efficient replication to an AWS S3 bucket.

Cloudian HyperFile

San Mateo, Calif.-based Cloudian said its Cloudian HyperFile, which was introduced in December, is the first object storage-based system to include all the features essential for enterprise NAS customers, making it suitable for deployment with capacity-intensive applications that employ file data. With Cloudian HyperFile, enterprise customers get limitless scalability at a significantly lower total cost of ownership than traditional NAS systems, the company said.

Cloudian HyperFile incorporates enterprise-class NAS capabilities including SMB/CIFS and NFS support, snapshot, WORM, nondisruptive failover, scale-out performance, POSIX compliance, and Active Directory integration. Pricing for complete Cloudian HyperFile storage offerings including on-premises disk-based storage starts at under $0.05 per Gbyte, per month.

Cohesity Orion 5.0

Orion 5.0 from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Cohesity combines end-to-end data protection and big data storage with a distributed, infinitely scalable architecture. The latest version of Cohesity’s secondary storage platform backs up data and acts as a searchable archive for large amounts of structured and unstructured data. It simplifies administration and increases efficiency by combining these historically siloed capabilities on a single platform that works across cloud and on-premises infrastructures with a single-pane-of-glass user interface. The fully indexed and searchable platform provides easy access and greater insight into data while eliminating redundant copies. Data is accessible to any application and user via standard protocols including NFS, CIFS/SMB and S3. It scales incrementally as storage needs increase or decrease.

Datrium Cloud DVX

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Datrium in November unveiled Datrium Cloud DVX, a cloud-native instance of the company's Datrium DVX on-premises compute nodes for managing primary and secondary storage. Datrium Cloud DVX offers recovery services for virtual machines running in DVX on-premises. It features global cloud deduplication and provides an efficient approach to virtual machine and virtual disk level backup and recovery.

Cloud DVX is a port of the DVX software to AWS. The first service available on Cloud DVX is a SaaS-based utility that runs on AWS, providing VM and vDisk backup and recovery for on-premises Datrium DVX systems. The new service offers high-performance global cloud deduplication and incremental backups to minimize the cost of capacity and network bandwidth. Granular, dedupe-aware recovery also provides accelerated recovery time objectives.

Druva Apollo For AWS

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based cloud data protection and management technology developer Druva early this year started delivering the Druva Apollo for AWS via its Druva Cloud Platform to manage Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service cloud workload data with a single policy control plane. The new offering protects and governs data and provide insight into data residing within AWS, including Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, and Amazon Relational Database Service. It builds on on Druva’s already existing data management services that span physical and virtual server environments, endpoints and cloud SaaS services like Office 365.

Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud WORM

Seattle-based Igneous in November unveiled Igneous Hybrid Storage Cloud Write Once, Read Many (WORM) policies to build data retention into cloud storage infrastructures. The policies prevent WORM-protected data from being deleted during a specified retention period, or indefinitely. This meets the legal and compliance requirements of many industries including finance, media and entertainment, manufacturing and health care where businesses must comply with internal and external data retention requirements or preservation use cases.

NetApp NFS Hybrid Service For AWS

NetApp NFS Hybrid Service for AWS is a new cloud data service for AWS customers based on NetApp’s OnTap software. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based NetApp said it is the first hybrid NFS service that delivers enterprise-class performance and availability for cloud and enterprise applications. It offers high levels of performance and availability to speed enterprise applications including analytics, DevOps, backup and disaster recovery.

NetApp NFS Hybrid for AWS enables both NFSv3 and NFSv4 with full-featured snapshots, and is available in cloud-only and hybrid cloud deployments, with integration into on-premises systems and seamless data migration and synchronization between on-premises and cloud.

Panzura Freedom Integration with Docker

Panzura Freedom from Campbell, Calif.-based Panzura is targeted at DevOps professionals looking to move and deploy containers in any cloud and any location leveraging persistent and mobile storage for Docker. Customers can also securely deploy global, private registries by pushing the container image to the Docker Registry once and automatically distributing it globally. With its Docker integration, introduced in November, Panzura Freedom brings a distributed global namespace to help eliminate islands of storage while reducing cost and complexity, SmartSync to make multiple copies of data by just using the metadata to reduce capacity requirements, distributed file and byte-range locking, and encryption of data both at rest and in transit.

Quantum Xcellis Scale-Out Storage Appliances With New StorNext 6

San Jose, Calif.-based Quantum in August released StorNext 6, the latest version of its StorNext scale-out file system combining high-performance streaming with advanced data management features for on-premises, hybrid cloud and public cloud environments. StorNext 6 ships with Quantum’s Xcellis workflow storage offering to help users overcome the limitations traditional NAS systems have with keeping up with the demands of large, rapidly growing data-intensive workloads, and helps drive business value from that data. This latest StorNext release provides more efficient and cost-effective ways to share and access files across geographically distributed teams, to manage and protect archived data, and to audit changes to data throughout its life cycle.

Qumulo File Fabric

Seattle-based Qumulo in September introduced the Qumulo File Fabric. QF2 is a modern, highly scalable file storage system that spans data centers and the cloud to store and manage a billion-plus files. QF2 includes real-time analytics and capacity quotas, as well as continuous cross-cluster replication and real-time snapshots. These capabilities stem from QF2's state-of-the-art data management system called QumuloDB that is optimized for the specialized needs of file-based data. QF2 is comprised of both software and services. The services include support, proactive cloud-based monitoring, and trend analysis.

Scality Zenko Orbit

San Francisco-based Scality’s Zenko Orbit is a cloud-based portal that simplifies the management of Zenko’s multi-cloud capabilities for data placement, workflows and global search. Introduced in November, Zenko Orbit is an easy way to get started with Scality’s Zenko Multi-Cloud Data Controller to manage multi-cloud storage. Orbit also helps analyze cloud data usage with detailed statistics, and monitoring of the Zenko instance itself.

Through a point-and-click graphical interface, Orbit allows cloud application developers to create Zenko workflows such as replication, life-cycle management and easy data upload/download.

SoftNAS Cloud Enterprise

Houston-based software-defined cloud NAS technology developer SoftNAS in October introduced multi-cloud data control and management technology based on its enterprise-class NAS capabilities. That included three cloud-native offerings -- SoftNAS Cloud Essentials, SoftNAS Cloud Enterprise and SoftNAS Cloud Platinum -- to control any data on any cloud. These three SoftNAS Cloud products are targeted at multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments with support for Amazon EBS block and Amazon S3 object storage. SoftNAS said the suite addresses real-world problems including cloud backup and disaster recovery, migrating and hosting business application and user data in the cloud, and simplifying complex global IoT and data integration projects.

Sungard Availability Services Cloud Recovery for AWS

Sungard Availability Services, or Sungard AS, in November unveiled an upgraded, fully managed cloud recovery solution on AWS. Sungard AS can now offer SLA-backed recovery for customers on AWS or on premises. The company said customers can expect sub-one-hour recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives for their x86 workloads.

Sungard AS Cloud Recovery – AWS replicates data on Amazon EBS to help ensure that AWS instances can be spun up using automated orchestration at the time of test or disaster. The company also manages the failover process during testing or disaster without impacting production operations. Sungard AS provides on-boarding, implementation, and ongoing monitoring and management of the service to help customers take advantage of AWS for business-critical recovery needs.

SwiftStack 6.0

The SwiftStack multi-cloud management platform from San Francisco-based Swiftstack provides for cloud-native storage for unstructured data in a single namespace, powered by policies to extend enterprise workflows across on-premises, private and public cloud infrastructures. On-premises data is retained in a cloud-native format for easy access, analysis and protection. SwiftStack 6.0, released in November, offers SMB/CIFS and NFS file access, public cloud archiving with a single storage namespace, visibility and access to a single multi-cloud namespace with the SwiftStack Client, deterministic placement of data across multiple regions, and enhanced erasure coding when placing data in multiple regions.

Tintri Cloud Connector Support For AWS

Tintri Cloud Connector, introduced in August by Mountain View, Calif.-based Tintri, lets businesses integrate their on-premises Tintri all-flash and hybrid flash array footprint with AWS. Tintri Cloud Connector moves data at the virtual machine level to and from AWS with built-in compression and deduplication for virtualized and cloud workloads. For example, customers can use AWS for the data protection, archive and disaster recovery of their mission critical on-premises applications and restore applications and data in a single click with Tintri. The company said this helps reduce cloud storage and data egress costs by up to 80 percent.

Veeam Availability Console

The Veeam Availability Console, unveiled in November by Baar, Switzerland-based data protection software developer Veeam, is a free management console for service providers delivering Veeam-powered services including fully managed backups, Backup-as-a-Service and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service, to more efficiently manage, monitor and invoice for these services. The company said the Veeam Availability Console helps MSPs looking to launch a managed backup service business to capture new revenue streams. Veeam Availability Console can also be used by distributed enterprises operating in an IT service delivery model.

Features include simplified customer on-boarding, remote network discovery of customer environments, remote management and monitoring of Veeam backups, and support for virtual, physical and cloud-based availability services.

WekaIO Matrix Version 3.1

WekaIO Matrix Version 3.1 supports cloud bursting to Amazon S3, letting users with on-premises compute clusters either elastically grow their environment during peak workload periods or move entire workloads to the cloud. San Jose, Calif.-based WekaIO said this simplifies periodic backups by enabling the entire file system and its data to be backed up on Amazon S3 without additional backup tools. The remote cloud copy can be automatically updated as frequently as desired without impacting application performance, and serves as a simple way to audit backed-up data by simply rehydrating the file system on AWS as a test copy.

The software can be provisioned either as a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance with applications and storage sharing the same instances, or as dedicated storage servers with lower-cost Amazon EC2 instances.

Zadara Storage VPSA Storage Array NAS File Services Enhancements For AWS
Zadara Storage, Irvine, Calif., in the third quarter of 2017 enhanced its VPSA storage array NAS file services with multi-cloud storage services connecting to all of the major hyper-scale cloud vendors, as well as with new on-premises and hybrid cloud options. The arrays, which can be configured with a mix of 1.6-TB SSDs and new 10-TB helium-filled spinning disks, offer NFS and CIFS/SMB protocols, a large SSD-based cache, automatic backups to Amazon S3, connection to 13 AWS regions, Docker-based Zadara Container Services, and instant snapshots, clones and remote replication.

Zerto Virtual Replication 5.5

Boston-based Zerto’s release of Zerto Virtual Replication 5.5 in August focused on hybrid cloud resilience and application mobility. ZVR 5.5 introduced Microsoft Azure bi-directional replication, making it what the company called the first offering to provide replication and recovery of enterprise-class applications both to and from cloud environments. It also offers up to five times faster AWS recovery compared with version 5.0, making it easier for customers to use a public cloud for disaster recovery or for test/dev on a near-real-time replication environment. In addition, ZVR 5.5's new Zerto Analytics platform provides real-time and historical analytics on the status and health of multi-site, multi-cloud environments.