The partnership creates a unified storage system that will let distributed offices and mobile employees access a single global fileshare which makes collaboration and centralized data protection possible.
Andres Rodriguez, Nasuni’s founder and CEO
Cleversafe, which makes a scalable, object-based storage solution with its own private cloud back end, and Nasuni, which offers Tier Two storage-as-a-service, have announced a strategic partnership. It will combine their respective strengths into a unified storage system that will let distributed offices and mobile employees access a single global fileshare which makes collaboration and centralized data protection possible, regardless of a user’s physical location.
“We have had a primary storage offering – pure storage-as-a-service in the data centre – where our cloud back end allows us tremendous scale, which lets us run without any disaster or backup systems and allows the building of a global file system,” said Andres Rodriguez, Nasuni’s founder and CEO. “Until now we have done this with public cloud providers, but we have seen a demand from very large customers with at least 500 TB of data that want to take advantage of the capability that we have, who want a private cloud.”
The technology in Cleversafe’s dsNet object-based storage solution features what they have trademarked as Dispersed Storage. It removes the need for RAID and replication because instead of copying the data, it slices it up into pieces and spreads it out over multiple independent storage nodes in a cloud. Using Cleversafe’s cloud as the primary storage pool, Nasuni Filers facilitate traditional NAS and block access to a single, master dataset shared across the world. Local Nasuni Filers cache frequently accessed data and provide local performance, while Cleversafe’s dsNet storage – deployed across many data centers – acts as the central hub. The combined system extends to mobile devices as well.
“Customers feel that Cleversafe is the leading private cloud vendor out there, and is a natural addition for us,” Rodriguez said. “For us, it expands our service so we now have a private cloud offering and can wrap an enterprise class data center solution around it. That means will be able to sell to larger customers than in the past. This lets us enter the high end of the enterprise at a volume and price point that are advantageous.” Rodriguez said that customers can expect at least 60% savings versus traditional primary storage.
“We are very excited about this because of all the capabilities Nasuni brings to the market,” said Russ Kennedy, Senior Vice President of Product Strategy and Customer Solutions at Cleversafe. “They have been focused on the sub-500 TB range — where Cleversafe has not been focused.” While the joint solution will enable Nasuni to move up in the market, it will do the reverse for Cleversafe.
Kennedy indicated that in addition to the complementary markets, the combination of their two technologies is very appropriate for the challenges IT is facing today.
“The new global file share capability enables customers with locations world-wide to share and collaborate on documents or other media cost effectively with this,” he said. “They will be able to leverage multiple protocols, including mobile and object, all in the same platform. This will let us go after the Tier Two NAS base market which we haven’t gone after before.”
On Monday, Cleversafe announced it had appointed Peter Howard as vice president of Channels and Alliances, reporting to Jeff Giannetti, SVP of Global Sales. Howard comes to Cleversafe from NetApp, where he was most recently vice president of Global Channel Sales during his nine years there.
“We are very excited about having Peter Howard come over,” Kennedy said. “He will work very closely with our channel. We see this solution as a very strong offering channel can go to market with. While both Nasuni and ourselves have partnerships in our ecosystems, we see this one as a very strong enabler for us.”
“Customers want to buy a solution, and this joint offering is a complete solution for the data center,” Rodriguez said. “It gives us access to the very large account and gives them a complete solution ready for the enterprise in the data center. It really allows customers to move forward without having to rip and replace the application level, and you get the benefits of scale and global file share functionality.”
