Cloudian’s Joint Venture with Digital Alpha: an Investment in a Flexible Storage Future
The on-demand era has changed expectations. In years gone by, storage required a huge amount of planning –around cost, technology issues, office real estate, and how much storage capacity to over-buy to meet needs stretching into the future.
That was the past. Today, users expect IT to deliver services, including storage, on demand and free of up-front capital outlays. The public cloud is the right choice to deliver this in some cases, but other times the data are best kept on premises. Those expectations are not at all unreasonable.
On Feb. 28, Cloudian announced a $125 million joint venture with Digital Alpha that includes a $100 million utility financing facility aimed at enabling that vision of a flexible, utility-like future for enterprise storage.
Through this partnership, customers will soon be able to use an on-premises solution that provides “the data sovereignty, performance and control of enterprise storage together with the economics of a pay-per-use model,” as our press release stated.
Digital Alpha will also support the development of a partnership between Cloudian and Cisco Systems, Inc., covering relevant data-center architectures, and the funding also includes a $25 million equity commitment to support expansion of Cloudian’s sales, marketing, engineering, and customer-support organizations.
It’s hard to find the customer benefits in most funding announcements, but the benefits to our customers in the form of new consumption models, expanded support, and additional engineering firepower to keep evolving the Cloudian platform are clear and exciting.
To learn more about flexible, multi-cloud management, check out Cloudian’s HyperStore 7 page.