Investors are betting big money on hybrid cloud storage as an attractive option for enterprises. Hybrid cloud vendor Cloudian has raised $24 million in new funding, the company announced today, bringing its total financing to $44 million. Cloudian’s thesis is that cloud storage often works best when paired with on-premises storage. That dual approach offers companies the speed and scalability of cloud services like Amazon Web Services, CloudStack, and OpenStack while enabling enterprises to keep their most sensitive data on their own private servers. Cloudian chief executive Michael Tso is keen to differentiate his company’s offering from cloud storage services like Box, Dropbox, and Egnyte.
One of the biggest technology growth areas in recent years has been the proliferation of vendors who are trying to drag storage into the modern age. While virtualization (and subsequent developments like Docker containerization) have modernized the way compute is consumed, storage has largely been kept in the dark ages. Who would have thought that in this day and age, when we all pocket personal devices with huge amount of flash-based storage, that enterprise storage would still rely on mechanical disks and rust-able media. A host of different initiatives have arisen to change this however. FromSolidfire building a flash-based storage platform, to Ceph solving the storage problem via Software Defined Storage (and, to clarify, in these two areas there are a plethora of competing vendors, I just called out the first two who spring to mind). Another vendor trying to modernize storage is Cloudian. Formed out of the previous vendor Gemini Mobile Technologies and re-launched in 2011, Cloudian offers a turnkey distributed object storage product. The idea being that using Cloudian, enterprises can deploy a multi-tenant storage resource sitting on commodity hardware. The Cloudian platform provides for all the logistics required to keep a service up and running (things like replication etc). The platform is also fully compatible with Amazon Web Services S3 offering.
