Amazon takes another step to suck up more enterprise data
Amazon Storage Gateway can now run in Microsoft Hyper-V as well as VMware ESXi (and of course Amazon EC2) environments. Welcome to the world of blurred boundaries. Read more »
Microsoft Azure storage ends the week with a bang — and not in a good way
photo: Flickr / getinet
Microsoft Azure, which started the week with kudos as the best cloud storage service, is down and out on Friday. Read more »
Surprise! Consumer apps get IT approval in small businesses
Employees are driving business apps selection in many small and medium businesses, according to new research. A good percentage of productivity, social and collaborative apps now sanctioned by IT in SMBs were brought in by workers without IT knowledge. Read more »
Storage: the crack cocaine of cloud computing
photo: Flickr / getinet
Storage price slashing continues as Microsoft meets cuts Google and Amazon traded last week. There’s method in this madness — lots of businesses have yet to test the cloud, and cheap storage is a way to attract those newbies. And once they’re hooked, watch out! Read more »
Guess what Mr. CIO? One in five of your employees uses Dropbox at work
Given Dropbox’s huge popularity — it claims 100 million users — it’s not surprising that many workers use it at the office. But that trend is worrisome to IT departments concerned with security breaches. Read more »
Nasuni scores $20M to build out storage sales effort
photo: Nasuni
Nasuni, which helps distributed companies manage their cloud storage securely, has $20 million in a new funding round — led by a mystery investor — to help it pay for new features and expand sales and marketing, said CEO Andres Rodriguez. Read more »
Microsoft snags StorSimple to pack more stuff onto Azure
Microsoft snarfs up StorSimple as an easy way to get customer data into its Windows Azure storage cloud. The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, signals increasing competition between Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the OpenStack crew for customer data. Read more »
Nasuni says it gives smartphones first class access to enterprise data
Nasuni, the startup that built its business bringing secure unified cloud storage to mid-sized businesses and companies with remote branch offices, is attacking the BYOD problem with new support for iPhone and Android devices, says CEO Andres Rodriguez. Read more »
Nasuni seeks to unify cloud storage
photo: Nasuni
Cloud storage specialist Nasuni is embracing unified storage, meaning its service now supports block storage (typically addressed by iSCSI and Fibre Channel devices) as well as the file storage it already supported and which is commonly used in branch and remote offices. Read more »
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Public, private or hybrid? How to move to the cloud
With more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
Amazon Web Services Storage Gateway is the company’s first foray into the on-premises cloud-storage space. But a number of vendors are attacking the on-premises cloud-storage gateway market too. Do these offerings signal the death of the cloud gateway as an appliance or simply validation of the market? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cloud ‘lock-in’ survey shows not all clouds are alike
When it comes to moving massive files between storage clouds, performance depends — a lot — on what clouds you use, according to new research. For it’s bulk data migration report Nasuni repeatedly transferred 12 TB of data between Amazon S3, Rackspace and Microsoft Windows Azure. Read more »
Dropbox: disruptor or flash-in-the-pan?
As Dropbox launches a new photo upload capability to make it easier to move digital photos from smartphones to the cloud, the debate as to whether Dropbox itself is the next big disruptor or just a feature to be acquired or co-opted flares anew. Read more »
Zetta raises $9M more for enterprise cloud storage
Cloud-storage provider Zetta has closed a $9 million Series C round. The company has now raised $31.5 million overall, an indication of just how much promise there is in the cloud storage space even, even if it’s still just relegated to backup. Read more »
Moving cloud storage to primetime requires new tech
New types of storage technology will be needed in order to shift cloud storage from a backup service to a primary function, according to a panel made up of storage entrepreneurs and execs at Structure 2011 in San Francisco on Thursday. Read more »
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A field guide to cloud computing: current trends, future opportunities
Cloud computing has grown from a pie-in-the-sky vision to a major IT movement over the past few years. As its promise has grown, though, so too has its scope. This report covers six key sectors in cloud computing: commodity Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), enterprise IaaS, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud storage and private clouds. We highlight the current state of each and provide informed insights into where they — and cloud computing in general — are headed. Much like any market in a still-evolving state, the infrastructure of the cloud-computing transition is still being built by startups, practitioners and even a big-name company or two. Companies mentioned in this report include VMware, Amazon, Nasuni, Terremark and Heroku. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
When It Rains, It Pours (Cash) for Storage Startups
It seems like when it rains for cloud storage startups, it pours, and this week was no exception. Egnyte closed a $10 million round, Scality closed a $7 million round, and RightScale chose Gluster to provide scale-out NAS within RightScale’s cloud management platform. Read more »
Cirtas Raises $22.5M for Its Cloud Storage Controller
San Jose startup Cirtas Systems has a new CEO and raised an additional $22.5 million to advance its vision of helping enterprise customers store primary data in the cloud. Cirtas is riding a hot trend of shuttling storage between on-premise appliances and backend storage clouds. Read more »
Nasuni Gets $15M as Cloud-Storage Gold Rush Carries On
Nasuni has closed a $15 million Series B round, bringing its total to $23 million over two rounds on the promise of its file system virtual appliance that automatically distributes files between the cloud and a local cache. Read more »
Nasuni and the Difficulty of Differentiating
Recently I questioned whether businesses would really be prepared to purchase cloud storage solutions from consumer-focused vendors. We take a look at how yet another entrant into the marketplace differentiates itself, and whether there is any chance of building a successful business in a saturated market. Read more »
