Artisan Infrastructure Adds Cloud-Based Object Storage

Artisan Infrastructure Tuesday said it has expanded its wholesale Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering with the integration of a new cloud-based object storage platform.

The new cloud-based object storage offering makes it possible for MSPs, cloud service providers, telecom service providers and other solution providers to add cloud storage for backups, disaster recovery, and file sync and share to their own managed services offerings, said Brian Hierholzer, CEO of Austin, Texas-based Artisan Infrastructure.

And those partners can add object storage at up to 70 percent below the cost of competing cloud storage, Hierholzer said.

[Related: IDC: File-Based, Object-Based Storage Growth Far Exceeds Overall Storage Growth ]

Artisan Infrastructure has focused on the wholesale cloud market since 2009, offering its IaaS technology only to those who offer managed services to other partners or to their own customer base, Hierholzer said.

In 2009, Artisan Infrastructure was looking at offering retail cloud services but was unable to find any cloud hosting companies offering wholesale services.

"We called and asked for their wholesale department, but realized there was no real wholesale mechanism," he said. "We saw channel programs, and discount pricing from retail. So we decided to scrap our retail cloud and move into providing infrastructure services."

Artisan Infrastructure currently offers compute, storage, networking and services infrastructure for customers on top of which partners offer their own software and services, Hierholzer said.

The latest part of its IaaS offering is cloud-based object storage, which Hierholzer described as the first of its kind offered on a wholesale basis. It is fully Amazon Web Services S3-compatible, making it easy for other service providers to add to their services, he said.

"We are the only company that's pure wholesale," he said. "Others say they do wholesale, but they also offer their own retail services."

IndependenceIT, an Allentown, Pa.-based provider of Desktop-as-a-Service technology based on Artisan Infrastructure's IaaS offering, is looking forward to its partner's new cloud-based object storage, said independenceIT President and COO Seth Bostock.

Artisan Infrastructure provides a platform on which independenceIT can offer its cloud-based desktop services, Bostock said.

"We buy the entire platform from [Artisan] on which to build a completely redundant virtual desktop platform," he said. "It's important to have a complete storage and backup offering for our customers."

NEXT: Integrating Artisan Infrastructure's Platform

The integration of independenceIT's services with Artisan Infrastructure's platform works well, Bostock said. "Our APIs tie right into the VMware APIs Artisan uses for integration into their data centers, providing us with a super-easy deployment on the Artisan infrastructure."

Artisan Infrastructure offers its cloud-based object storage to partners at a fixed 2.9 cents per GB, per month. Hierholzer compared that with Rackspace, which charges 10.0 cents per GB, per month for the first GB, and to AWS S3, which charges 9.5 cents per GB, per month for the first GB.

A public beta of the new cloud-based object storage started on Aug. 15, and about half of the 1,500 maximum beta testers have registered to try it, Hierholzer said. The service is targeted to be available for production services in mid-October, he said.

Artisan Infrastructure's wholesale IaaS offerings are available from the company or via the ArrowSphere cloud services program of distributor Arrow Electronics.

PUBLISHED AUG. 21, 2013