A Cost Effective Scalable Storage Platform for Cloud Storage Services

Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are increasingly eyeing Cloud Storage Services as a rapidly expanding revenue opportunity. With unstructured data growing >50% annually — and with GDPR requirements driving greater need for storage control — the time has never been better for MSPs to enter the space or expand their offerings.

Key concerns for MSPs are the time and cost of building and managing a storage infrastructure. In the face of high acquisition costs, scalability issues, and management-intensive systems, how do you ensure a robust and profitable storage solution? Adding to the complexity, customers now require complete storage accountability to ensure GDPR compliance.

To address these challenges, MSPs around the globe have selected Cloudian as their storage platform. In over a dozen countries and on nearly every continent, Cloudian scale-out S3-compliant storage solutions help MSPs innovate. Solutions deployed on Cloudian today include storage-as-a-service, backup-as-a-service and archive-as-a-service.

Simple Management, 70% Less CAPEX

Cloudian is built on industry-standard servers, which gives MSPs the freedom of choice to deploy either pre-configured Cloudian appliances or Cloudian software on their preferred hardware. Either way, they benefit from enterprise-class storage provisioning and management capabilities at a 70 percent lower cost than traditional storage appliances. Limitless scaling ensures simple, single-pool management, regardless of the capacity deployed.

Cloudian HyperStore is easy to administer. New nodes can be provisioned quickly, which allows MSPs to further save capital expense by scaling capacity along with customer demand, rather than ahead of demand. With granular data management, customers know exactly where their data resides. Built-in metadata tagging lets them quickly find specific information when needed.

The MSP Challenge

Delivering competitive solutions is a constant concern for MSPs, particularly in the face of low-cost offerings from public cloud providers. MSPs need to contend with several challenges:

  • Growth: Must ensure capacity availability, without building in too much idle capacity
  • Costs: Need to deliver high-quality, ultra-reliable service — on a budget that ensures profitability
  • Scale: Performance and capacity must grow without increasing management workload
  • Integration: Must work flawlessly with customer applications to ensure high satisfaction with the least possible support cost

 

Cloudian Solutions

Storage-as-a-Service

For SaaS offerings, Cloudian offers the ability to start small and grow limitlessly. Simple management, built-in data protection, and the industry’s most interoperable S3-API compatibility help get services up and running quickly. Advanced features include multi-tenancy, with native QoS and billing. The intuitive user interface can be rebranded. Cloudian’s robust API simplifies integration with management tools. Fine-grained configuration tools give you the ability to set data protection levels based on each customer’s specific needs.

Backup and Archive-as-a-Service

For backup services, Cloudian HyperStore acts as a backup target for most popular backup platforms, including Commvault, Veritas, Veeam, and Rubrik. Compared with conventional expensive disk-based backup and slow, tape-based solutions, Cloudian provides the optimal mix of performance and cost. Fast streaming throughput that scales with capacity supports large backup jobs. Cloudian’s data protection and erasure coding options, configurable for up to 14 nines data durability, ensure that data is secure.

Solution Advantages

Highest level of S3 compliance

Cloudian HyperStore is the industry’s only solution built from the start to support the S3 API. Shipping since 2011, HyperStore is proven to have the highest level of S3 API interoperability, which means fewer support calls and higher customer satisfaction.

½ cent per GB per month

Built on industry-standard hardware, Cloudian drives down the cost of disk-based storage—with enterprise scalability and data protection—to as little a 1/2¢ per GB, per month, including support.

Choice of deployment models

MSPs can deploy Cloudian as software on industry-standard commodity servers, or opt for Cloudian appliances with end-to-end support. Save rack space with exceptional density—up to 700TB in just 4U rack height.

Start small and grow quickly

You can start small with just three nodes, and scale to petabytes simply by adding nodes to meet customer demand. Scaling is seamless and does not require downtime. No matter how large you grow, you still manage a single cluster.

SOLUTION BENEFITS

  • 100% native S3 API for industry’s best interoperability
  • Costs as little as ½ cent per GB per month
  • Unlimited scalability
  • Self-service customer portal
  • Multi-tenancy features with QoS
  • Acts as backup target for popular backup solutions

“We selected Cloudian because we needed an object-based storage solution that was turnkey and could scale easily without a lot of administrative effort. We wanted to spend less time managing our storage and more timing helping our customers be innovative in the cloud.”

Allen Hall
Director of Cloud Engineering at rediCloud

“We have seen growing demand for object storage as a reliable and cost-effective solution for Big Data requirements. We tested Scality, Red Hat, and Quantum, but found that only Cloudian object storage delivers the features and S3 interoperability we need. Cloudian HyperStore is now a key part of our Storage-as-a-Service solution.”

Lars Olav Habberstad
CEO at Purity IT

“Before we deployed Cloudian, our S3-compatible storage footprint growth was modest. Now we’re more than doubling it every year. With Cloudian, we continue to solidify our service delivery infrastructure and accelerate the growth of our customer base. Our business opportunities for object storage are bigger than they’ve ever been.”

Craig McLellan
Founder at ThinkOn