The Cloudian Data Management Partners Program launches with four partners out of the gate.
Jon Toor, Cloudian’s Chief Marketing Officer
Earlier this month, San Mateo CA-based object storage vendor Cloudian announced their first program for channel partners. Today they are announcing their Data Management Partners Program, a new program for their technology partners.
“This is an exciting announcement,” said Jon Toor, Cloudian’s Chief Marketing Officer. “Object storage is a wonderful thing, but it needs to interact with other applications in the data centre to provide real value. We really rely on the software in our data environment to push data from different application environments into Cloudian HyperStore.”
The Data Management Partners Program validates the integration of third-party data management products with Cloudian, to consolidate multiple data silos into a single, infinitely scalable environment
“We have over 70 technology partners of different kinds,” Toor said. “However this one piece of the puzzle is central to our customers. People know object storage is infinitely scalable. But for many it’s still an ‘it sounds great – how do I go do it’ issue. This program provides the ‘how to’ that makes that happen.”
Toor said the new program is designed to provide specific parameters to facilitate the use of the joint solutions.
“We are not just saying that we tried it and it worked,” he stated. “Full joint testing has been done, and we are providing joint support capabilities. A full solution documentation has also been set up to people can look at it. All of this has also been communicated out to the field.”
In many cases, joint selling is taking place as well, Toor added.
The program has four members in it out of the gate: Rubrik, Komprise, Evolphin, and CTERA Networks. The joint Rubrik and Cloudian solution is around data protection, the one with Komprise is unstructured data lifecycle management, CTERA involves file sync and share and Evolphin deals with media active archiving.
“We jointly presented a solution at NAB in the spring with Evolphin, and it has been in use then for at least six months before that,” Toor said. “They have unstructured data in media clips, which sits in an all-flash environment, but they also have a sea of information, which is less frequently used, so doesn’t need to be on the all-flash, but still has to be readily accessible. We provide the active archive environment for that.”
“There are a number of different types of things we can do with this,” said Sylvia Chang, Evolphin’s Director of Marketing. “When we put things into different tiers with Cloudian, we can set different retention policies for the automatic archiving of content.”
While Nutanix is a vendor partner of Cloudian, and Cloudian demonstrated their Cloudian HyperStore for Nutanix offering at Nutanix’s .NEXT event, Nutanix is not in the program because as of today, they don’t meet a fundamental prerequisite.
“To qualify, a partner has to move data through W3 or file connector to the Cloudian environment,” Toor said. “We are working on that with Nutanix, but we are not there today. Today we deploy only within a Nutanix cluster.”
Toor also indicated that what while the program will expand, realistically, the number of potential partners is limited.
“It would be accurate to say that the number of strong candidates could be counted on two hands,” he said. “The company has to be a data mover, and has to be in production deployment. The number who fit that definition is fairly small.”
