AWS Re:Invent 2016: 16 Storage Products For AWS Clouds

Cloud Storage Front And Center

For solution providers who bring customers to private or public clouds, storage is a key part of the platform. Storage done right allows data to exist on-premise and in the cloud or both, and ideally can be migrated between the two or between clouds.

The recently concluded AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas may have been a showcase for all things Amazon, but in reality many storage vendors were there showing offerings that spanned not only AWS clouds but also Microsoft Azure, Google and others in addition to private clouds. This included an an array of storage hardware and software taking advantage of the cloud for data migration, data protection, disaster recovery and other purposes.

Intrigued by the possibilities? Check out AWS re:Invent and some of the storage technologies shown there.

And for fun, you can also go back a year and look at last year's AWS re:Invent storage news.

Barracuda Backup 6.3

Barracuda Backup from Campbell, Calif.-based Barracuda Networks received a significant performance boost to enhance backup and restore speeds with September's release of version 6.3. The enhancements boost initial backup speed and recovery performance by up to two times on large files and up to three times for file server backups with millions of small files. In addition, customers now have the option to leverage the Barracuda Backup Export Tool, which lets them export data to virtual tapes stored in AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) or Glacier for archiving using the AWS Storage Gateway-VTL. Also, the Barracuda Backup Agent now provides multi-treaming and supports granular recovery for physical-to-physical, physical-to-virtual or virtual-to-virtual scenarios. And a new queuing system increases replication speeds for highly transactional environments with large amounts of replicated change data.

Cloudian HyperStore

Cloudian, San Mateo, Calif., used AWS re:Invent to show off its Cloudian HyperStore, a simple-to-deploy offering for object storage with fully integrated appliances, software for customers' own industry-standard appliances, or a metered-by-use model from Amazon. Cloudian HyperStore is an on-premise equivalent of the public cloud, and uses the same APIs while offering the same scalability and chargebacks to customers or departments. Cloudian HyperStore stores data locally, in a public cloud like Amazon or Google, or both, all as a single storage pool. Cloudian HyperStore is targeted at managed service providers looking for petabyte-scale storage and data protection for backup/archive, storage as a service, and hybrid cloud in markets including media and entertainment and financial services.

Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition (CE)

Cohesity, Santa Clara, Calif., used AWS re:Invent to unveil the Cohesity DataPlatform Cloud Edition (CE), which extends the benefits of its on-premise consolidated secondary storage solution to AWS and Microsoft Azure public cloud infrastructures. The Cohesity DataPlatform CE combines Cohesity’s on-premise consolidated secondary storage offering to public cloud infrastructure enabling transparent data movement across environments. This new offering is available to businesses of all sizes to provide seamless cloud-based data protection, DevOps, and disaster recovery across both public and private cloud environments.

Commvault VM And Backup Recovery Solution Set

Commvault, Tinton Falls, N.J., expanded its Commvault VM and Backup Recovery Solution Set with new reference architectures with AWS to help customers simplify data protection and management in the AWS cloud with a pre-optimized, easy-to-deploy, and validated solution based on Commvault’s software. Available through Commvault partners, the reference architectures provide solution providers with guidance on how the Commvault Data Platform can help customers optimize their use of the AWS Cloud for backup, archive and recovery. Commvault also said existing customers can apply their licenses to applications enabled through the AWS Marketplace. Customers can also easily direct data storage to specific AWS services including S3, S3-IA and Glacier.

Datera Elastic Data Fabric 2.0

Datera, Sunnyvale, Calif., used AWS re:Invent to introduce the latest version of its Datera Elastic Data Fabric, an offering that delivers elastic block storage for on-premise clouds.

Datera Elastic Data Fabric 2.0 now supports all-flash storage nodes. It can be configured with up to 50 nodes with a total of 5 petabytes and 5 million IOPs per single cluster. It also now has VMware Ready for Storage with VAAI (vStore API for Array Integration) certification. The offering is also now integrated with Mesosphere DC/OS to help provide seamless scalability and rapid provisioning for container-based cloud deployments of cloud-native applications, including those built on Cassandra, MongoDB and other NoSQL databases. Prior to this, it featured integration with Docker Swarm and Google Kubernetes. The offering now also supports Dell PowerEdge R-Class servers.

Dell EMC NetWorker With CloudBoost

Dell EMC showed off its NetWorker with CloudBoost software-defined offering for delivering enterprise-grade backups for applications running on AWS. The offering can run completely self-contained within an AWS EC2 environment, and includes client-side optimized backups, inline de-duplication, and encryption and compression with backup directly to Amazon S3. NetWorker with CloudBoost helps enterprises leverage Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Standard – Infrequent Access to protect their AWS workloads using the same tools and interfaces in their on-premise environment. A single NetWorker with CloudBoost environment can span use cases such as extending on-premise data protection to the cloud for long-term retention, direct-to-cloud data protection, and in-the-cloud data protection.

IBM Spectrum Protect v8.1

IBM used AWS re:Invent to introduce version 8.1 of its IBM Spectrum Protect offering, which targets channel partners delivering cloud storage solutions for data protection. These solutions include backing data up to the partner's storage cloud and/or a public cloud, backing up cloud-hosted data to cloud-hosted backup servers, and disaster recovery as a service.

IBM Spectrum Protect v8.1 includes a high-performance, high-efficiency Amazon S3 interface to allow "storage-less" and hybrid cloud backup solutions, a local cache and large block I/O for performance, built-in deduplication and compression, and incremental "forever" backups. Setup and monitoring are built into the administration graphical user interface for ease of use.

NetApp Data Fabric Cloud Sync Service

The NetApp Data Fabric Cloud Sync Service, which was introduced early last month and was demonstrated at AWS re:Invent, provides a simple, automated way to get data into AWS and run the desired cloud service. This on-demand Software-as-a-Service offering allows users to continuously move and synchronize data between on-premise storage and AWS S3 in the cloud. NetApp said the NetApp Data Fabric Cloud Sync Service provides customers visibility into data by seamlessly leveraging AWS analytics tools with on-premise data. This, the company said, decreases the total cost of ownership as customers pay only for cloud resources when needed. Cloud Sync is currently available through the AWS Marketplace.

Scality S3 Server

The Scality S3 Server, shown at AWS re:Invent by San Francisco-based Scality, is an open-source object storage project that enables on-premise S3-based application development and data deployment. Scality S3 Server software is an open-source version of its S3 API. Packaged as a Docker container that is deployed on a single server, the Scality S3 Server lets developers code to the S3 API locally and to extend the API if needed. Scality said enterprises can leverage the Scality S3 Server to accelerate time-to-market of cloud applications without having to first decide where the application will be deployed in production. Applications developed with the Scality S3 Server will be freely deployable on-premise and/or in the AWS public cloud without changing a single line of code.

SoftNAS Cloud 3.4.8

Houston-based SoftNAS demonstrated its SoftNAS Cloud at AWS re:Invent. SoftNAS Cloud is a software-defined, enterprise-class NAS virtual storage appliance for public, private and hybrid clouds. It supports NFS, CIFS/SMB, iSCSI and Apple File Protocol (AFP) file protocols, allowing data to migrate to the cloud re-architecting 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, as well as supports Active Directory. Data is encrypted both at rest and in flight. SoftNAS offers customers a money-back, 99.999 percent uptime service level agreement.

Stratoscale Symphony

Attendees at AWS re:Invent saw Stratoscale Symphony, a turnkey software offering 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.

SwiftStack Cloud Sync

San Francisco-based SwiftStack used AWS re:Invent to unveil availability of SwiftStack Cloud Sync, an offering for managing data in hybrid clouds. SwiftStack Cloud Sync replicates native objects to a bucket in the cloud rather than storing them in a proprietary archive. This, the company said, allows applications to easily access and use the data for content delivery networks, active archives, and collaboration solutions, as well as for cloud bursting and further archiving to Amazon Glacier. Cloud Sync lets customers choose either AWS storage or Google Cloud Storage in hybrid solutions. Policy management is done by placing data in hybrid cloud topologies within a single namespace. SwiftStack said that, in 2017, it plans to expand Cloud Sync to support additional public cloud platforms and expand data management for hybrid cloud applications.

Treasure Workflow

Treasure Data, the Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of Live Data Management platform to help enterprises collect and unify their data for use in running business analytics, used AWS re:Invent to introduce the general availability of Treasure Workflow. Treasure Workflow is a data workflow manager that can seamlessly operate across multicloud infrastructures and web services. Treasure Data said the offering lets enterprises collect, transport and analyze data from business applications and data stores across their organizations, and in particular ensures interoperability and data flow between cloud infrastructures regardless of vendors. Customers can use it to build and manage repeatable data processing pipelines in their organization. It is a cloud-agnostic offering, communicating bi-directionally with cloud services such as Google BigQuery, Google G Suite, Amazon Redshift and more.

Veritas InfoScale And NetBackup

Veritas, Mountain View, Calif., unveiled new capabilities for its InfoScale software-defined storage for the cloud and its NetBackup data protection applications at AWS re:Invent. The new capabilities are aimed at optimizing enterprise application migration and simplifying data protection deployment within AWS environments.

Veritas InfoScale which offers software-defined storage for the cloud that the company says helps ensure application performance, scale and resiliency requirements are met, is now optimized for AWS clouds. To better protect these applications and other cloud-based workloads, the company introduced a new Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for NetBackup.

Zadara Storage Cloud Flash Storage-as-a-Service Option

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.

The company also used AWS re:Invent to introduce its new Flash as a Service optional configuration featuring Intel SSDs. Zadara claims the high-performance option offers price-parity with hard drive-based solutions.

Zerto Virtual Replication 5.0

Boston-based Zerto demonstrated its new Zerto Virtual Replication 5.0, which went into general availability on Nov. 15. Zerto Virtual Replication 5.0, which is sold only via channel partners, helps enterprises build and manage a hybrid cloud platform while protecting and replicating critical data and applications.

Zerto Virtual Replication 5.0 is a heterogeneous data and application protection, replication and mobility solution for building and managing a hybrid cloud platform supporting AWS and Microsoft Azure and other public cloud providers. The new offering brings enterprise-class disaster recovery to Microsoft Azure to deliver what the company called the industry’s first hypervisor-based one-to-many replication, a new mobile application for remote monitoring, and 30-day journaling to remove the impact of data loss from using infrequent backups.