Talon Storage Solutions Inc. today is releasing a new version of its CloudFAST distributed cloud storage platform for Microsoft Windows, featuring new options for procurement, licensing, deployment and provisioning.

The company is also improving its infrastructure monitoring capabilities to enable IT organizations to better manage availability and performance using Talon’s tools as well as Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager.

CloudFast enables customers to manage shared filed access across a global network with features like caching, file locking, and transport optimization and “differencing” – a feature that transmits changes to files rather than files in their entirety. The result is cloud storage features and performance that simulate to that of local file shares. Customers can use CloudFast to provision five terabytes or more of cloud storage in less than three minutes, with attributes that mimic those of a local file share.

CloudFast isn’t a replication engine but rather a single storage resource in the cloud that enables files to be processed locally. Upon provisioning cloud storage customers download a local image that applies their Active Directory authentication profiles to the cloud server and coordinates access control.

“Users don’t know they don’t have a file server,” said Charles Foley, senior vice president of Talon. “They go to the shared drive, find a file and click to open it. They’re validated by Active Directory, that file is opened up in the cloud and a lock is put on it.” Because the file is based in the cloud, rather than on a local server, users around the world can share files as if they were all using the same local server.

In CloudFast 4.0, Talon has a simplified licensing on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Users no longer have to go through an extra steps of setting up an Azure storage account and file share before provisioning storage.  The entire Talon infrastructure can now be managed with Microsoft’s SCOM, and new management APIs are included for scripting and simplified remote management.

Pricing is based upon capacity used, beginning at roughly five centers per gigabyte per month with a five-terabyte minimum and volume discounts.

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