Moving Data To The Cloud: 16 Offerings Taking Advantage Of Existing Clouds

Turnkey Solutions To Bring Storage Clouds To The Channel

Using some type of public storage cloud, whether from hyper-scale providers like Amazon or Microsoft or from a host of smaller offerings targeting specific customer types or workloads, is only as good as the technology that lets solution providers help customers take advantage of such clouds.

Fortunately for solution providers, managed service providers and other types of partners, the range of options for taking advantage of cloud-based storage is large and growing. Such options range from tools for optimizing capacity on general-purpose storage clouds like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure to tools providing access to specialized clouds that promise specific capabilities or privacy the larger clouds cannot provide.

For CRN's 2016 Cloud Storage Week, we're taking a look at a number of technologies that bring already-existing storage clouds to customers as an alternative to building clouds to spec. Here's a look at the possibilities.

Acronis Cloud Storage

Acronis Cloud Storage from Burlington, Mass.-based Acronis is an off-site cloud backup storage subscription that turns any Acronis Backup or Acronis Backup Advanced application into a hybrid cloud backup offering. It provides a safe, secure and scalable one-step off-site backup for any data protected with other Acronis data protection offerings, including disks, partitions, servers and data. Customers can recover individual files, folders or applications or an entire system, from the Acronis Cloud, which is based in local Tier-IV-designed and SSAE-16-compliant data centers.

Archive360 Archive2Azure

Archive2Azure is a regulatory compliance storage offering optimized for the Microsoft Azure platform. Introduced in June by New York-based Archive360, Archive2Azure lets partners deliver long-term, secure retention of unstructured data including journal email for regulatory compliance and litigation preparedness, file system work files, individual PST files, system-generated reports and other unstructured data without requiring customers to invest in on-premise unstructured data solutions.

Archive2Azure uses Azure to provide a legally defensible migration with full chain-of-custody, data fidelity and ongoing disposition. It is fully integrated with Azure Search for search on demand with policy-driven data scoping. It also provides a secure, long-term legal repository with case management and legal production.

Axcient Fusion 1.5

Axcient Fusion 1.5 is a platform targeting data resilience by helping customers converge and consolidate nonproduction workloads in Mountain View, Calif.-based Axcient's cloud. Axcient Fusion is targeted at solution providers and managed service providers working with midsize enterprises and small and midsize businesses.

Axcient Fusion provides cloud orchestration and automation features to simplify how businesses recover from disasters and outages with pre-written workflows to automate all aspects of the recovery process from network settings to the order in which applications are recovered in the cloud. Axcient Fusion 1.5, introduced in August, includes new capabilities such as single-click file and folder recovery, improved user experience with simplified protection and recovery workflows, and increased replication performance with recovery point objectives measured in minutes.

Barracuda Cloud-To-Cloud Backup

Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup gives IT administrators and managed service providers real-time backups to simplify the process of recovering accidentally or intentionally deleted emails and files in Office 365, including Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online files. It takes advantage of Campbell, Calif.-based Barracuda Networks' own cloud to protect customers' Office 365 environments while establishing a recurring revenue stream for the partner. The latest edition in October provides Microsoft SharePoint Online with granular backup and recovery options and the ability to restore individual files that have been deleted, corrupted or encrypted by ransomware without having to complete a full recovery of the SharePoint environment.

Carbonite E2

Boston-based Carbonite's E2 protects data both on-site and in the cloud for businesses with five or fewer servers and 500 to 1,000 GB of data. Introduced in November, E2 ensures business' most recent daily backups are kept on-site for accelerated recovery, with an entire year of backups kept in the Carbonite cloud for site failures and disasters. The dedicated E2 backup appliance is delivered ’as a service’ so hardware, software and cloud storage is included in the subscription price. Carbonite handles maintenance or updates, and provisions enough cloud capacity for a full year of backups.

Users can monitor and manage the solution with E2's web-based portal from anywhere. Recovery options include both granular and bare-metal recovery, and users can restore data to dissimilar hardware.

Code42 CrashPlan Central

CrashPlan, from Code42 Software, a Minneapolis-based SaaS provider of endpoint data protection and security, offers the option of backing data to local drives, off-site drives, or online to the CrashPlan Central cloud, or to all three. CrashPlan is mobile-device-friendly with browser-based file accessibility and 448-bit encryption. The offering works with multiple terabytes of data, and allows the creation of backup sets to prioritize which files are backed up where, and how often. Online backups can be set to run as often as every minute. An unlimited number of versions can be kept in CrashPlan Central, and deleted files are kept for as long as desired for future recovery.

Ctera Enterprise File Services Platform 5.5

The Ctera Enterprise File Services Platform from New York-based Ctera lets managed service providers and other partners provide comprehensive file storage, file sync and share, mobile collaboration, and backup offerings using nearly any cloud, and to manage them from a single platform.

Version 5.5 of the platform, released in June, introduced several new capabilities including a refreshed cloud storage gateway portfolio with a 400 percent capacity expansion, improved backup speeds, and a new virtual appliance configuration. Also new are PC-to-Mac migration capabilities for restores across operating systems, and cross-cloud migration tools for transition across clouds and avoiding lock-in to any single cloud or object storage vendor. Version 5.5 also included several new security and privacy improvements.

eFolder Cloud

Atlanta-based eFolder, which offers several cloud-based data protection and business continuity offerings including some developed in partnership with other cloud storage companies, backs up many of those offerings with its eFolder Cloud. This includes the company's flagship eFolder BDR (backup and disaster recovery) offering, which backs up or replicates images of critical servers, virtual machines and workstations from client office locations to the eFolder Cloud. If a site-wide disaster occurs, partners can virtualize and run client servers in the cloud until normal operations resume.

Hitachi Content Platform

The Hitachi Content Platform from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Hitachi Data Systems provides petabyte-scale storage software to manage data that can span private and public clouds. With HCP, customers can move data to, from and between their choice of local and public cloud services while retaining visibility and control over the data. HCP segregates data in a multitenant environment and allows chargebacks based on actual utilization. Data stored in HCP is automatically tagged with metadata to let businesses set and automate policies for how data is managed and where it should be stored. HCP supports a wide range of local and public cloud storage options ranging from low-cost local economy tiers to integration with public clouds including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Verizon or any S3-based service.

IBM Frontsafe Cloud Portal Software

IBM's Frontsafe Cloud Portal is "’white-label" software designed to simplify on=boarding, billing automation, multitenancy and service-level monitoring for managed service providers and cloud service providers providing commercial backup and recovery as a service and data protection for hosted applications. Frontsafe Cloud Portal software is purpose-built for partners who can provide backup and recovery as a service with their own custom brand and invoices. It uses IBM Spectrum Protect backup software as its scalable backup platform. IBM Spectrum Protect lets service providers manage backups without investing in backup storage capacity, if they choose, by directing backups to Amazon or other clouds. It includes a self-service restore portal and full-featured vSphere Web Client to help partners reduce administration costs and offer service agreements.

Infrascale Disaster Recovery

Infrascale provides backup and disaster recovery offerings that protect business users' data, including endpoints, virtual and physical servers, and mission-critical applications, in the Infrascale Cloud or in third-party clouds such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. The Los Angeles-based vendor targets midmarket business storage users and their partners in industries with limited IT resources.

The cloud-based Infrascale Disaster Recovery provides enterprise-grade disaster recovery to business clients, including the ability to be back up and running after a disaster in 15 minutes or less, allowing partners to gain new recurring revenue streams to start or expand their storage cloud business. It is available to partners as a turnkey hardware-software system installed in their data center, or as a software-only system installed in a virtualized environment.

Nasuni Enterprise File Services

Nasuni Enterprise File Services takes advantage of private or public clouds and on-premise edge appliances to deliver a file storage offering that provides unlimited capacity, access from anywhere to the global file share, and automatic data protection. The offering, from Natick, Mass.-based Nasuni, lets partners offer their distributed enterprise customers modern file storage system that addresses issues around access, capacity and data protection.

Nasuni Enterprise File Services combines local edge appliances and cloud storage to provide global access to data with local performance and infinite scalability. In addition, the offering addresses data protection, archiving, security, and file data storage management issues.

Panzura Inside

Panzura Inside from Campbell, Calif.-based Panzura is a cloud-integrated offering for file data to help customers replace legacy storage environments with a cloud-based architecture for all their workloads.

Introduced in September, Panzura Inside combines Panzura's hybrid cloud NAS software with legacy flash arrays and hyper-converged infrastructure systems to deliver high-performance block and file storage. With the offering, a Panzura virtual controller is deployed beside a flash array or on a hyper-converged infrastructure system where it grabs SSD capacity to cache active unstructured data, which is then moved to private or public cloud storage, including cloud storage from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google, IBM and more. The active data remains cached in the Panzura virtual controller. The offering provides backup, disaster recovery, replication and archiving.

SugarSync

SugarSync, which is owned by J2 Global, a Los Angeles-based cloud service provider, offers partners a file sync and share offering backed by the company's cloud. Files are synchronized from any PC or mobile device by right-clicking on a folder for availability or sharing across the cloud. Users have full control over how the files are shared, including restricting access. A remote wipe feature allows all synchronized files to be deleted if a device is lost or stolen, and also allows easy transfer of files to a new device. iOS and Android apps are available.

Talon FAST

Mt. Laurel, N.J.-based Talon's Talon FAST is a single storage resource in the cloud that enables files to be processed locally. Available in the Microsoft Azure marketplace, it runs on StorSimple on premise appliances.

TalonFAST is a software-based offering that provides a distributed network file system, intelligent caching, file-level differencing and global locking. It also provides a global namespace that lets service providers provide access to cloud-based storage resources to customers with global networks as if the customers' offices were in same physical location, without the need for on-premise storage. TalonFAST consolidates data into a single cloud repository to deliver single-data-set collaboration.

Zadara Storage Cloud

The Zadara Storage Cloud from Irvine, Calif.-based Zadara Storage is an enterprise-grade storage-as-a-service offering for any type of storage including object, file and block. It works with private, public, hybrid and multi-cloud environments as well as any major storage format to help solution providers and cloud service providers provide storage as a service.

The Zadara Storage Cloud, which was introduced in May and enhanced in November with flash storage as a service, natively supports AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Partners can combine those with private clouds while bundling their own compute or other resources into a complete offering. Users can build their own custom configurations via a web interface. Customers can take advantage of up to 3.2 TB of elastic flash cache, optional Docker and Zadara Container services, and optional backups to AWS S3.