Cirtas, a new cloud storage system, emerges from stealth mode today. It’s off to a great start with $10 million in Series A funding, led by NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Amazon. The company is hitting the ground running, with no plans of becoming a forgotten startup in the crowding sea of cloud-computing solutions.

That being said, Cirtas is coming out the gates with a new product called Bluejet Cloud Storage Controllers, offering an array of services for the enterprise. The public launch presents a company dedicated to WAN optimization techniques for a more complete cloud-enabled storage system. What Cirtas aims to do is provide an advanced solution for more control over a business’ cloud environment, as a Controller for management and protection.

This is achieved through partnerships with Amazon, Iron Mountain, and other key players, giving clients options from which they can pick and choose. The broad access to platform services extends public and private cloud solutions, rolled into one. This of course, is of growing importance as businesses seek scale for their virtualization processes and protection.

“Public cloud storage has many attractive attributes – no hardware or software to buy or manage, the ability to scale up or down on-demand, and inexpensive pricing – but it isn’t without its challenges: security, application compatibility, and performance to name only a few,” said Adam Couture, research director at Gartner.

Couture goes on to note the importance of covering the public and private space, saying “…hybrid cloud storage models – on-premise controllers combined with public cloud storage – can deliver capabilities not possible with on-site storage such as the ability to easily move data from one service provider to another to attain better pricing.”

There are other tools Cirtas offers, including real-time analysis and forecasting capabilities, simplifying the management process of running a system on the cloud. This streamlining of services, particularly across this hybrid environment, is meeting the demand of many businesses. Dave Vellante, analyst and founder of Wikibon.org, highlights the importance of this approach:

“In my view, the allure of the public cloud has a magical appeal, but the reality is that if you’re not a Ruby on Rails jock or experienced developer, you’re going to need help getting data into and out of the cloud. Offerings like those from Cirtas do the hard integration work and make the public cloud more accessible to mainstream business users that don’t have the expertise or time to manage the complexities and data consistency risks associated with moving data back and forth from the cloud.”

Some notable features of Cirtas Bluejet:

CloudLock Data Security: Securely encrypts all data in transit to and at rest in the cloud, ensuring only authorized users have access to stored information. Even if a security breach occurs at the cloud provider level, Bluejet’s CloudLock Data Security prevents data from being read or used.

CloudCache and CloudReduce: CloudCache is a high-speed, automated tiered cache spanning RAM, SSD, and spinning disk to accelerate the end-user experience, and improve performance by keeping frequently accessed data on the Bluejet appliance to reduce the need for data retrieval from the cloud. CloudReduce provides reduction technology that de-duplicates and compresses data prior to transmission to the cloud.

CloudSnap: Provides users with unlimited, fully automated and space-efficient snapshots of data stored in the cloud, enabling easy recovery from user and application errors; eliminates the need to perform separate backups of primary data stored on Bluejet.

CloudConnect – Facilitates use of multiple cloud providers, making it simple to spread data across multiple cloud platforms and eliminating the need to re-write applications to proprietary cloud storage APIs. Provides a standard iSCSI interface to servers.

CloudForecast: Built in return-on-investment (ROI) calculator provides on-demand insights into cloud storage costs on a volume-by-volume basis, with real time, ‘ROI-on-the-fly’ reporting for chargeback accounting.