Enterprises are at a cross-roads as they look to scale out services and support demanding, dynamic applications. The legacy systems that have been central to providing storage, networking and computing for years are largely unsuited for new operational paradigms that require on-demand resources, self-service of infrastructure and high flexibility in hardware.
At the same time, many of these companies must ensure data security and compliance. They want to take advantage of the cloud and pursue projects such as analytics, but they have to figure out what to do with the massive quantities of information that they keep on-premises. Cost is also a major consideration – how feasible will it be for organizations to modernize infrastructure and migrate assets along the way, and can open source software and standards-based hardware help keep spending down?
To this end, Seagate's Cloud Builder Alliance partners have been working on solutions that address the particular needs of enterprises, giving them tools that leverage cloud computing services in a secure, powerful way. In this month's round up, we'll look at what partners such as Egnyte, Basho, Nexenta, Silicon Mechanics and EVault have done recently to help companies improve cloud storage systems.
Egnyte partners with Richard Fleischman and Associates to provide file sharing services to financial sector
In 2013, Egnyte launched a program option for providers of managed services, hosting and cloud computing. Since then, Egnyte has benefited from how its solutions give MSPs and others a single platform for handling a comprehensive range of scenarios involving file sharing and synchronization.
Building on this success with MSPs, Egnyte recently announced a partnership with Richard Fleischman and Associates, a MSP that serves clients in the financial services industry. RFA will be able to take advantage of Egnyte's unique product capabilities and utilize secure file sharing and collaboration in its existing infrastructure. Egnyte's solutions are notable for working with on-premises setups, cloud platforms or a combination of the two, giving enterprises the flexibility they need to manage data across complex environments.
"Our partnership with Egnyte enables us to add enterprise-grade file-sharing to the suite of services we offer our customers. Egnyte's solution also adheres to the strict compliance standards of the financial services industry, while offering the privacy and security that the hedge fund industry demands," said RFA CTO Grigoriy Milis. "We chose to partner with Egnyte because Egnyte's flexible deployment models and benefits are best-in-class for our customers as well as our own team members."
Egnyte channels director Mort Jensen stated that the company had seen 30 percent growth in channel revenue contributions in the past year. Describing Egnyte's advantages, Jensen pointed to MSPs' ability to utilize Egnyte services in their own data centers and in multi-tenant environments.
Going forward, the channel will be a high priority for Egnyte, with the RFA deal underscoring this growing area of interest. Egnyte vice president Rajesh Ram told Talkin' Cloud that the company planned to double its channel presence by the end of 2014.
Basho teams up with Talend to help organizations use NoSQL for big data projects
Businesses are storing more information than ever before in databases, and as such, many of them are looking to move from relational to NoSQL technologies. NoSQL tools are more scalable and offer faster access to data, making them ideal for big data projects.
Basho has partnered with integration software vendor Talend to make the transition process easier. Users will be able to quickly and efficiently move assets into Riak, Basho's distributed NoSQL database, plus they can pair Riak with Hadoop for analytics. Moreover, the new options afforded by the Basho-Talend partnership help mitigate the risks that sometimes surround NoSQL migrations, resulting in faster, more cost-effective transitions.
"A growing number of customers are looking to migrate data to more flexible, distributed NoSQL environments," said Basho marketing manager Jeremy Hill. "Through our partnership with Talend, customers can now migrate to Riak and other big data solutions with ease – which, in turn, saves customers valuable time and money so they can get up and running quickly. By pooling our resources, we can provide an integrated solution that enables this migration work for customers and eliminates the need for them to pull together a piecemeal solution themselves from scratch."
Nexenta discusses NexentaStor 4.0 for Q2 2014
Nexenta already has approximately 1 exabyte of storage installed and more than 5,000 users. In late February, the company hinted at the impending arrival of NexentaStor 4.0, which will bring lower latencies, improved performance and simpler installation.
Nexenta is a leader in software-defined storage, with ZFS-based solutions that are both highly scalable and economical. Silicon Mechanics, another Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance partner, has touted Nexenta's success in giving organizations the tools they need to retain and intelligently manage large quantities of data.
"Silicon Mechanics' strong partnership with Nexenta has been instrumental in helping customers realize the benefits of software-defined storage with an innovative product that improves performance and reliability," stated Silicon Mechanics president and CEO Eva Cherry, according to TweakTown. "[W]e are excited about how the enhancements in NexentaStor 4.0 will continue to help customers address the challenges inherent in big storage."
Key features of NexentaStor 4.0 include heterogeneous block and file replication, unlimited storage size, reduced failover time and simplified disk management via command line or NexentaStor Management Viewer. Migration to the Illumos open source OS also brings improvements in security and monitoring.
EVault is the choice for cloud disaster recovery
Disaster recovery used to be too expensive for most organizations to afford. Now, thanks to cloud infrastructure, setting up a DR strategy is much more feasible. EVault, a Seagate company, has become a leader in cloud-connected data backup and DR, and organizations have begun ditching old tape-based systems for modern alternatives.
According to TechTarget, Consigli Construction of Milford, Mass., took up EVault solutions to simplify DR, starting with a backup of company servers. Full DR capability was added soon thereafter, and now Consigli can recover all of its servers, with the exception of its Microsoft Exchange environment, within 24 to 48 hours of an outage.
