Storage For The AWS World: 10 Hot Products You Need To Check Out

When Amazon Web Services held its recent AWS re:Invent conference, storage vendors were front and center with a wide range of hardware, software and cloud-based ways to store, manage and protect data in the cloud.

Storing, Managing And Protecting Data On The Largest Cloud Provider

Despite slight changes in market share over the past few quarters, Amazon Web Services continues to keep its crown as the winner of the cloud wars. The Seattle-based company in the second quarter of 2023 had the largest share of the cloud market, controlling about 32 percent of the total market, according to Synergy Research.

To keep all the applications running and to feed all the compute instances, the cloud market leader requires massive amounts of data that needs to be stored, managed, migrated and protected.

For that reason, storage vendors come out to AWS events in force to show their latest in hardware, software and services. And last month’s AWS re:Invent 2023 conference was no exception.

Multiple storage vendors have found AWS public cloud environments an important market for them as their customers not only move more data to the cloud, but also from the cloud and back and forth as data gets sent to where its owners find the right combination of cost, access speed and flexibility.

Don’t need to access the data now? Put it in slow cloud storage. Need immediate access? Put it in the highest tier of cloud storage, or perhaps in high-performance on-premises storage. Need to access it now, the archive it for some specified time? Maybe migrate it from the cloud to an on-premises array and then to low-cost archival arrays or cloud tiers.

These things are possible because a wide range of storage vendors have created technology that leverages the AWS cloud to provide those capabilities and more. CRN has collected 10 new storage products, all of which were introduced at AWS re:Invent or shortly before, to show what is possible when using the latest storage technology with the world’s largest cloud.

Here is a look at these 10 new storage products.

Vega Cloud: Vega Datametry

Vega Datametry from Liberty Lake, Wash.-based Vega Cloud offers a view into the utilization of data across solution providers. It provides contextualized details on cost and helps track expenditures based on categories like database, schema, user, warehouse and more to help users pinpoint which data is contributing to business growth. Vega Datametry also provides advice to help reduce expenses with suggestions on warehouse right-sizing, unused tables, usage patterns and suspension times. With the implementation of these recommendations, companies using Vega Datametry can save up to 25 percent on their total cloud expenses, the company said.

HYCU R-Cloud

At AWS re:Invent, Boston-based HYCU showed major updates to its HYCU R-Cloud data protection platform. These updates provide AWS customers and partners with additional protection for the SaaS applications and cloud services used from build to run on AWS. New to R-Cloud is expanded coverage to deliver automated backups and granular restores for many new AWS services, including new service offerings for AWS Identity and Access Management, AWS CloudFormation, AWS Lambda, AWS Key Management Service, Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB. HYCU also offers broad coverage of SaaS applications including Okta, Jira Software, Confluence, Terraform, Asana, Salesforce and more.

Dell Apex Navigator For Multicloud Storage, Dell Apex File Storage For AWS

Dell Apex Navigator for Multicloud Storage is a new SaaS-based tool for customers to deploy, configure and manage Dell storage in public clouds, including monitoring and data mobility across on-premises and public clouds. The Round Rock, Texas-based company’s first storage offering supported is Dell Apex Block Storage for AWS, which comes with a risk-free 90-day trial. Dell is also showcasing updates to Apex File Storage for AWS that increase storage capacity in a single namespace from 1PiB to up to 1.6 PiB, expand geographic availability, and better manage analytics use cases with Hadoop Distributed File System support.

Veeam Kasten K10 V6.5

Kasten K10 V6.5, the latest from Columbus, Ohio-based Veeam’s 2020 acquisition of Kubernetes workload data protection developer Kasten, introduces trusted container environments, enhanced ransomware protection, and data protection support for large-scale Kubernetes environments. Advances in ransomware protection and a hardened federal container registry ensures data security against a variety of threats is combined with enterprise-scale capabilities to help businesses grow their Kubernetes investment safely and securely, the company said.

Cohesity Turing Integration With Amazon Bedrock

Cohesity, San Jose, Calif., is now allowing customers to sign up for early access to Cohesity Turing, a collection of AI capabilities and technologies that are part of its multi-cloud data platform. Cohesity will integrate Cohesity Turing with Amazon Bedrock, a managed service that makes foundation models from leading AI companies accessible via an API to build generative AI applications. In addition, Cohesity used AWS re:Invent 2023 to showcase new upcoming capabilities for protecting AWS workloads with Cohesity DataProtect, including support for Amazon S3 and enhanced support for Amazon RDS. This expansion complements Cohesity’s data protection offering for Amazon EC2.

Informatica IDMC Integration with Amazon Bedrock

Enterprise cloud data management technology developer Informatica late last month took steps to develop deeper integrations with Amazon Bedrock’s fully managed generative AI service. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company’s AI-powered Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC), a platform thath provides catalog, integration/engineering, API/app integration, quality/observability, master data management, governance and privacy, and marketplace capabilities, now supports Amazon Bedrock customers with trusted data and enriched context to improve accuracy of key generative AI use cases, the company said.

Nutanix Cloud Clusters

Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) from San Jose, Calif.-based Nutanix in November was enhanced to provide a faster path to the cloud by extending on-premises environments to public clouds including on AWS as a way to deliver a single platform to run apps and data anywhere. Enhancements included strengthened cyber resilience with Nutanix Data Lens and Nutanix Unified Storage on NC2, which proactively detects and blocks ransomware threats within 20 minutes and includes a one-click recovery; expanded availability with new regions and bare-metal types; and protection against availability zone failure. Businesses can also now leverage the AWS marketplace to purchase the full NC2 stack.

Qumulo Nexus And Global Namespace

The Qumulo Nexus management interface, introduced last month by Seattle-based Qumulo, shows two clusters—one in AWS and one on-premises in Seattle—connected together via Global Namespace. Nexus provides unified management to view and manage all Qumulo clusters wherever they are located. Users who log in with authorized credentials can navigate the dashboard displaying connected clusters, whether in AWS or on-premises; access data seamlessly across clusters from a single namespace designed in Nexus; and manage data sources while ensuring compatibility and compliance with established protocols. Qumulo said the interface simplifies data management to provide smooth interactions between diverse systems and improve operational efficiency.

VMware: New Architecture For VMware Cloud On AWS

VMware by Broadcom used AWS re:Invent to introduce its latest architecture for VMware Cloud on AWS enabled by an Amazon EC2 M7i bare-metal instance. It features custom 4th-Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, also known as Sapphire Rapids, as part of a managed service combining VMware Cloud Foundation and Amazon EC2 elastic, bare-metal infrastructure. The offering targets business-critical applications running across private, public and hybrid cloud environments. VMware said the service offers the same architecture and operation experiences on-premises and in the cloud to help rapidly extend, migrate, protect and modernize vSphere-based applications on AWS.

Amazon EC2 M7i instances are expected to be available for VMware Cloud on AWS in Broadcom’s first fiscal quarter 2024.

Vast Data Platform Version 5.0

Vast Data, the New York-based developer of a platform that combines storage, database and compute to power AI and GPU-accelerated applications, late last month unveiled version 5.0 of its Vast Data Platform. The new version extends the capabilities of the Vast Data Platform with AWS to provide cloud cost savings of up to 80 percent, the company said. Enhancements include the ability to combine multiple protocols (SMB, NFS, S3, and DataBase tables) into a single namespace, the ability to manage and deploy Vast clusters across private clouds and AWS, use machine learning to report on anomalous user events and data behaviors, and enable audit logs to be directly streamed into and queried from the Vast DataBase.