Using patent-pending data optimization and dedupe technology from an acquisition, HybriStor brings enormous scalability and performance to object-based storage.
Larry Hart, Artisan Infrastructure’s SVP, Cloud Solutions and Strategic Alliances
Artisan Infrastructure has announced its Neverfail HybriStor data protection appliance. The software offerings are designed to address capacity, performance, and interoperability limitations of competitive products, and feature nearly unlimited capacity expansion, scalable performance, instant local/remote recovery, and a multi-vendor architecture.
“Our roots were as a cloud provider, and our three pillars now are around cloud, cloud management and business continuity,” said Larry Hart, Artisan Infrastructure’s SVP, Cloud Solutions and Strategic Alliances. “This is from the business continuity part of the equation.”
HybriStor is a next generation purpose-built backup appliance with nearly unlimited scalability. The technology for this specific solution comes from the acquisition of enterprise storage software solution vendor Just One Data late last year, and is the first product from that acquisition. That company was focused on data optimization and dedupe, to remove performance limitations of object-based storage.
The HybriStor appliance features bi-directional replication across multiple sites, global data deduplication, and N-to-1 data protection which lets multiple, geographically-dispersed data centers be protected with a single remote site optimized for large scale protection.
“This really addresses a new market segment which was difficult to address before because of scalability issues,” said Steven Hwang, Technical Product Manager at Artisan Infrastructure. “Data goes from ROBO offices to the data centre and eventually the cloud, Doing this requires the capacity to both scale out and scale up.”
“This is really an extension of our cloud,” Hart said. “It is both a purpose-built backup appliance and an object storage gateway. We decided to make an on-prem appliance because of this vision of connecting back to us. We will still sell through same channel, just with an on-prem location.”
More dots still need to be connected to complete this vision, Hart acknowledged.
“This is our first substantiation of a hybrid solution,” he said. It is a software-only product at this time, but it will eventually be available as hardware as well. Our vision over time is to connect it all together, but as an acquisition, it takes time to do all the integration.”
The HybriStor appliance can be connected locally to direct-attached storage — or to local OpenStack Swift object storage, with the latter providing significant scalability and major cost reductions compared to traditional disk or tape.
“Because we are also a gateway to object storage, something our competitors do not have, we have strong enterprise grade performance,” Hwang said. “It works with other storage products through a NAS interface, although it can also be used to replace them if the customer wants that.”
Chin Kuo, SVP, Product Development, at Artisan Infrastructure
“That NAS interface also means there is no vendor lock-in,” said Chin Kuo, SVP, Product Development, at Artisan Infrastructure, who was Founder of Just One Data and joined Artisan with that acquisition. “Our InstaCache technology also provides instant data recovery as well. Our competitors have huge memory requirements for inline storage. We have optimized this to reduce those requirements [with patent pending hybrid inline/post deduplication]. We can also dynamically restore cache. That’s a differentiator right there.”
