Startup dots map with storage hubs for scattered apps
Most companies — 67 percent, according to this survey — are using hybrid-cloud computing infrastructure or plan to in the near future. They know their mix of legacy and modern software applications won’t all fit snugly in the same spot. What they don’t know is where they will all eventually settle; choices keep multiplying, mutating, advancing or going out of use. Companies may be anxious for hot-off-the-grill tech, but loath redoing all the plumbing. Also, long-distance relationships between apps and storage can mean data latency. Hybrid storage as a service can help; it follows transient apps around the exploding information technology universe.
ClearSky Data Inc. is a storage as a service startup working with medium and large enterprises in a range of industries. Most possess a mix of hybrid infrastructure, with some lagging miles behind the state-of-the-art.
“Honestly, we’ve seen everything,” said Ellen Rubin (pictured, left), co-founder and chief executive officer of ClearSky. “I won’t embarrass anyone specifically, but there are still some kind of scary, old data centers out there. There are silver closets that are acting like data centers; people still have things in their buildings.”
Then there are high-end, cloud-connected collocation centers from Equinix Inc., with whom ClearSky just inked a partnership deal, though they’ve worked together in one form or another for several years.
Rubin and Laz Vekiarides (pictured,), co-founder and chief technology officer of ClearSky, spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed the problems with delivering data to apps far from the storage source and the companies expansion plans. (* Disclosure below.)
The company just raised $20 million in venture funding led by new investor Pear Tree Partners L.P. Also on board was General Catalyst Partners LLC; Highland Capital Partners; Polaris Partners LP, and an unnamed “very large, very well-known tech company,” according to Rubin.
Customers are in a state of confusion about IT. They don’t know if the next fork in the road will take them to hyperconverged infrastructure or cloud-native serverless computing. They avoid lock-in like the plague, and hedging their bets is of utmost importance, Rubin explained.
As long as customers’ applications are all over the place, they’ll benefit from resources that meet them where they are, she added. That’s what ClearSky is offering with its storage for hybrid cloud.
When the cloud is someone else’s computer 3,000 miles away
ClearSky delivers on-demand primary storage and offsite backup and disaster recovery in one service. It serves data to customer applications wherever they may be at the moment — on-prem, in public cloud, or at the edge. It uses colocated appliances and proprietary caching technology that categorizes data. It gauges the best possible location through usage patterns and customer policies. It cashes hot data at the edge of applications; warm data in a Points of Presence, or PoP, within 120 miles of the customer’s data center; all data, including archival, in multiple locations in the cloud with on-demand accessibility.
Its heavily dotted map of locations can give customers lower latency compared to large cloud storage providers. The cloud, after all, is just someone else’s computer. So if a hybrid customer’s application is in Vermont and its cloud storage provider is in California, what does that mean? It means Joe in Vermont will have a latency problem he wouldn’t have if the provider were in Burlington.
A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:
Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.
One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.
Join our community on YouTube
Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.
THANK YOU