Category Archives: Cloud Storage

Amazon AWS, Amazon.com, Box, Cloud Storage, DropBox, Storage, Venture Funding

Box, Dropbox Coming of Age? Ready to Take on Amazon?

“Two of the buzziest competitors in cloud computing are settling into coexistence — and maybe figuring out ways to take on the giant in the market, Amazon.com.”

That’s the lead of a New York Times Bits column today that arrives on the heels of the news that Box has a new round of VC funding to the tune of$125 Million.

“Like its competitor Dropbox, Box offers a little bit of data storage free, then charges for additional amounts. Both companies make money from a relatively small number of paying customers who need large amounts of storage. Mr. Levie said Box has about 125,000 businesses using its service, but only “tens of thousands” of paying customers.

Despite being in the same business, the two companies seem to be finding entirely different customer bases. While Dropbox has a corporate service, it recently announced capacity and pricing changes in its much larger consumer business, aimed at encouraging people to store things like photos taken with cell phones.”

 


Andreessen Horowitz, Bitcasa, Cloud Storage, Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity, First Round Capital, Pelion Venture Partners, Storage, Venture Funding

Bitcasa Gets $7 Million for “Infinite” Cloud Storage

Bitcasa, the cloud storage company that integrates infinite storage, sync, backup and share into desktops and across devices, announced today that it has raised $7 million in its Series A funding round, bringing the total funding to $9 million. Pelion Venture Partners, an existing investor, and Horizons Ventures, a new investor, led the round, with Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, CrunchFund, and Samsung Ventures participating. Funds will be used to further accelerate the company’s impressive growth, shorten the time-to-market for upcoming storage and data management offerings, and expand sales and marketing. The company’s service offering is also now officially in open beta, and users can sign up at http://www.bitcasa.com.

In the past few months, Bitcasa users in 120 countries saved more than 4 petabytes of data and uploaded more than 1 billion files to Bitcasa. The service uses client-side encryption, compression, and deduplication technologies to seamlessly integrate infinite storage into all of the devices. Users can now store, sync, backup and send infinite amounts of data without having to worry about management and capacity constraints. During the beta program, they can take advantage of the service for free; after beta, they can continue the access to infinite storage for only $10 a month.

“As the seed investor, we have been impressed with Bitcasa’s efforts to solve the storage challenges that consumers and small and medium businesses face,” said Carl Ledbetter, managing director at Pelion Venture Partners and a Bitcasa board member. “Bitcasa’s infinite storage solution solves space, management, and security challenges for today’s users and has been well-received by the tens of thousands who have tried the service during its beta period. Bitcasa’s solution goes far beyond services that provide only backup, synchronization, or large file sharing or movement; Bitcasa is the first and only service that provides unlimited storage of all of a user’s files in the cloud, making the cloud-based virtual desktop a reality. This is the way we will all connect to our online, tablet, mobile, and PC-based environments in the near future, and Bitcasa is the defining step.”

“I am glad to see the continued commitment of our initial investors, as well as the involvement of our new investors,” said Tony Gauda, co-founder and CEO of Bitcasa. “This funding round shows that our investors recognize the potential that we have in this market and have been pleased with our progress. It is exciting to see the users’ increased adoption of our infinite storage solution that helps them store and share more data than they could have ever imagined. We are working on more amazing features and are currently looking to bring on great talent to join our team.”


Cloud Storage, Featured, Storage, Storage and Information Management

Top Takeaways From EMC World 2012

A little over a week has gone by since the end of EMC World, and all the product announcements have gotten out of the bag. So, why another article about EMC World, if there are no “big reveals” left? Because I want to make sense of all of the hype, product announcements, and strategic discussions. What do the over 40 new products mean to GreenPages’ customers—both present and future? How many of those products were just cosmetic makeovers and how many are actual game changers? Why should you, our friends and extended business family, care, and what should you care about?

I will start by saying that this EMC World really did reveal some technology-leading thoughts and products, and proved that EMC has taken the lead in major storage technology strategy. EMC has always been the 800-pound gorilla of the storage industry, but for many years was far from the front of the pack. This has changed, and in a big way. Innovation still takes place mostly in the small companies on the bleeding edge of storage (SSD, virtualization across platforms, innovative file systems), but EMC has become the leading investor in storage R&D, and it shows. While they may not be inventing the coolest and most striking new storage and hardware, their pace of development and integration of that cool stuff has exponentially increased. Time to market and product refresh cycles are picking up pace. Relationships with the people who get the products in front of you (resellers, integrators and distributors) are vastly improved and much friendlier to the commercial world we all live in (as opposed to the rarified heights of the largest enterprises). The relevance of EMC products to the virtualized datacenter is clear, and the storage engineers who ran the technical sessions and laid out all the new storage, DR, and virtualization roadmaps proved that EMC is the leading storage technology firm in the world.

What are the highlights for GreenPages’ world?

Product Announcements:

Probably the biggest technology in terms of impact, IMHO, is Isilon. This is the fastest, most scalable, easy-to-manage NAS systems ever. It can grow to the petabyte range, and there is no downtime or forklift upgrades. It is “scale-out” storage, meaning you add nodes that contain processing (CPU), RAM for Cache and additional bandwidth, along with capacity in three flavors (SSD, 15K and 7.2K).  This is the system of choice for any healthcare PACs application or Life Sciences data storage. It is a fantastic general-purpose NAS system as well. Isilon is the system of choice for anyone managing Big Data (large amounts of unstructured data). The entry point for this system is around 10 TB, so you don’t have to be a large company to find the value here. Isilon also has the advantage of being a true scale-out system. Some technical nuggets around Isilon OneFS Upgrade: 90% greater throughput, or 740 GB/sec; roles-based admin – SEC 17a-4 compliance; better caching (50% reduction in latency of IO intensive apps; VMware Integration: VAAI (vStorage APIs for Array Integration) and VASA (vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness).

If you are going to jump up into the big time storage array arena, the new VMAX line is arguably the one to get, for power, performance and integration with the virtualized datacenter. It has expanded to the VMAX 10, 20 (current), and 40. The top of the line sports 8 controllers, scales up to 4 PB, has up to 32 2.8 GHz Xeon 6-core processors, 1 TB usable RAM, 2.5” drives,  and uses MLC SSD drives (bringing that cost of the flash drive down into the lower atmosphere). The latest development of the auto-tiering software FAST allows IBM and HDS storage to be a “tier” of storage for the VMAX. Other arrays will be added soon.

VNXe 3150 storage system offers up to 50% more performance and capacity in an entry level system. This system includes 10 GbE connectivity, Solid State Storage and the first production storage system (that I have heard of) that uses the latest Intel CPU, Sandy Bridge. Who says EMC product lifecycles are slow and behind the times??

VPLEX Metro/VPLEX Geo solutions have some significant upgrades, including integration with RecoverPoint and SRM, more performance and scalability; and Oracle RAC up to 100 KM apart. If you want to federate your datacenters, introduce “stretch clusters” and have both an HA and DR strategy, this is the industry leader now.

The VNX Series  has  more than a few improvements: lower price SSDs, RAID types that can be mixed in FAST; 256 snaps per LUN; connector for vCOPs; EMC Storage Analytics Suite based on vCOPs; AppSync to replace/improve Replication Manager.

The new VSPEX Proven Infrastructure includes EMC’s VNX and VNXe hybrid storage arrays, along with Avamar software and Data Domain backup appliances. The cloud platform also includes processors from Intel, switches from Brocade, servers from Cisco, and software from Citrix, Microsoft HyperV and VMware.  Avamar and Data Domain products will offer data deduplication to users, while EMC’s Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), will offer data migration between varying disk storage arrays based on data use patterns. There are initially 14 VSPEX configurations, which EMC said represent the most popular use cases for companies moving to cloud computing.

Data Domain & Avamar upgrades include the DD990 with an Intel Sandy Bridge CPU, doubling the performance of the DD890 – 28 PB, 16 TB/hr throughput; tight integration of Avamar with VMware, including Hyper-V, SAP, Sybase, SQL2012 – recovery is 30 times faster than NBU/V-Ray.

Vfcache PCIe NAND Flash Card is a server side I/O enhancement that pushes Flash Cache to the server, but integrates Cache management with the VNX array FAST Cache. This will prove to be a huge deal for mission critical applications running on VMware, since I/O will no longer be a bottleneck even for the most demanding applications. Combine this with Sandy Bridge CPUs and the UCS system with the latest M3 servers and you will have the world’s most powerful server virtualization platform!

DataBridge is a “mash-up” of nearly any storage or system management tool into a common pane of glass, not intended to be a discovery or management tool but, rather, to be a place where all of the discovery tools can deliver their data to one place. This combines EMC infrastructure data sources along with non-EMC data sources with business logic from customer organizations. Stay tuned for more on this.

There are lots of other deep technical messages that were talked about in the sessions that ran for three solid days, not counting the unbelievable Lab sessions. Those Lab sessions are now available for demo purposes. You can see any EMC technology from implementation to configuration just by contacting GreenPages and asking for your Friendly Neighborhood Storage Guy!!

One final thought I would like to stress: efficiency. EMC is sending a smart business message of efficiency, using VNX as example. Storage is far outstripping storage advances and IT budgets. All is not hopeless, however. You can improve efficiency with dedupe/compression, auto tiering; Flash allows storage to keep up with Moore’s Law; you can consolidate file servers with virtual file servers (we have done this with many GreenPages customers when consolidating servers in VMware). Files are the main culprit. How will you manage it, quotas or content management? What will you chose? How will you manage your data without the money or work force you think you might need?

Contact GreenPages if you need help answering these questions! Meanwhile, watch for more storage technology breakthroughs to come from EMC in the coming months.

Cloud Storage, Enterprise storage, Storage, StorSimple

StorSimple Cloud-integrated Enterprise Storage Connects Enterprises to HP Cloud Services

StorSimple today announced that its family of Cloud-integrated enterprise storage appliances supports HP Cloud Services (http://hpcloud.com). Enterprises can now consolidate primary, backup, archive and disaster recovery storage into a single StorSimple cloud-integrated storage system connected to HP Cloud Services, driving a reduction in storage TCO of 60 to 80 percent in many cases. StorSimple customers can mix and match HP Cloud Services with any other cloud storage services they are currently using, eliminating the vendor lock-in on the data center floor that is common with traditional SANs.

“HP’s open-source approach to cloud services encourages customers to deploy applications in HP Cloud Services with the confidence that they will not be locked into one particular service provider.” said Steve Querner, vice president of sales for StorSimple. “Cloud-integrated enterprise storage from StorSimple provides the same open approach to cloud storage by certifying multiple leading cloud storage services. When adopting an open approach to cloud storage, customers should insist on features that facilitate cross-cloud functionality without compromising on an enterprise high availability feature set.”

HP Cloud Services public beta offering is certified by StorSimple and supports the full range of StorSimple cloud data management features, including Cloud Snapshots™, thin restores, non-disruptive upgrades and dual path redundancy. StorSimple customers can now use HP Cloud Object Storage as a tier of storage, transparently extending their Windows and Linux datasets, which could be running on VMware and Hyper-V, into the cloud.

A key benefit of HP Cloud Services is the open-source approach. Aligned with HP’s approach to a customer-choice model, StorSimple cloud-integrated enterprise storage systems allow HP Cloud Services customers to simultaneously store complete sets of data across multiple cloud providers. This open architecture prevents the limitations of vendor lock-in in data centers for enterprise customers.