UPDATED 11:00 EDT / NOVEMBER 20 2018

INFRA

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.

Direct-connect services can bypass this problem, since they don’t rely on the internet to move data around. Like the name implies, they offer a direct, private connection instead. It’s a kind of luxury IT service that’s not affordable for all companies.

“Latency from Boston to Amazon East for us is 11 milliseconds,” said Laz Vekiarides (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of ClearSky. “For most people, if they don’t have direct connect at some exorbitant price, they’re going to end up experiencing in the hundreds of milliseconds if they’re going over the internet.”

So the hypothetical customer in Vermont storing his data in the nearest ClearSky PoP gets super-low latency at an affordable price, he explained.

“You get all of the economics of the cloud and the flexibility that you get with those types of services, but you get the experience of enterprise-class functionality and capabilities, and it’s nearby, ” Vekiarides said.

Cloud-on-prem limbo keeps apps on the move

“All in Amazon Web Services Inc.,” or “all on Google Cloud Platform” may sound glamorous. Some see all-in-cloud as a sort of status symbol for modern digital businesses. However, they may or may not be the cheapest, most practical, or easiest infrastructure arrangements.

Several years ago, everyone thought cloud was going to be cheap and simple. But what fully migrated company today would say it’s cheaper and easier than operating on-prem was? It might be in spots — but many are finding that being 100 percent in public cloud isn’t what the hype-machine cracked it up to be. Some are putting workloads in cloud only to pull them back on-prem once the bill arrives.

“A lot of customers think the cloud is a logical strategy for them, but over time they see that it increases cost,” Jeff Kroth, manager of data management and analytics at Softchoice Corp., recently told theCUBE. “It’s really about aligning the rightsizing of your environment, moving the right applications, the right data to the cloud, and using that as part of your overall strategy.”

Some legacy companies can’t chuck their data center just like that. “Because we are such an old company, we still have our legacy DB2 infrastructure,” Ash Dhupar, chief analytics officer for Publishers Clearing House LLC, recently told theCUBE. “A lot of our back-end databases, a lot of our back-end processes are all attached to that.”

That infrastructure came in handy after one experiment soured the company on cloud a bit. “We have a MapR cluster, which was cloud-based, and now we have brought it on-prem very recently,” Dhupar said. Running it on-prem is cheaper and better suited to data-privacy compliance, according to Dhupar.

Most customers are experimenting with on-prem and cloud technologies. Resources that cover their apps wherever they fling to give them one less thing to rethink, rework and reconfigure.

“The whole process of moving things back and forth is so seamless and transparent, you just don’t manage it,” Vekiarides said. “It’s all sort of a byproduct of the architecture.”

ClearSky’s deal with Equinix will allow it to triple its number of locations throughout the U.S. and, eventually, beyond.

Watch the entire video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations(* Disclosure: ClearSky Data Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither ClearSky nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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