Veeam, Savvis and Parallels Add Cloud Storage

It seems every day, a software supplier or service provider offers new options to use the public cloud for storage and data protection.

The latest came this week, when Veeam Software released a connector that will let users of its backup and recovery software use any of 15 public cloud Infrastructures as a Service (IaaS) as backup targets. Among them are Microsoft's Windows Azure, Rackspace's Cloud Files, HP Cloud and Amazon Web Services' S3 storage and Glacier archiving services.

Veeam Backup Cloud Edition addresses data security with support for AES 256-bit encryption and aims to address network performance via its compression and de-duplication algorithms. Customers can also boost performance using WAN accelerators, explained Rick Vanover, Veeam's product strategy specialist. The company has partnerships with WAN optimization vendor Riverbed and cloud gateway supplier TwinStrata.

Customers can backup virtual machines, Vanover said. The offering allows enterprise customers to choose IaaS providers without having to learn their respective APIs. Are customers really looking to replace traditional tape with the cloud as a backup target? "People have been asking for this," Vanover said.

Last week, cloud provider Savvis announced the release of its Symphony Cloud Storage offering. PJ Farmer, director of Savvis' cloud storage product management, said in a blog post that the service offers "automatic protection from geographic disaster and for easily providing local storage targets for distributed applications."

Based on EMC's Atmos platform, Symphony Cloud Storage offers built-in replication and enables organizations that must address data sovereignty to set policies where data is stored.

But it's not just the big players that are eying storage and backup and recovery. I've talked to a number of providers who target small and medium businesses (SMBs). Cloud storage was a big topic at the Parallels Summit in Las Vegas last week, where the company launched Parallels Cloud Storage, a platform that allows SMB-focused cloud and hosting providers to improve storage capacity and utilization to create self-healing, distributed, high-performance storage pools.

"It's highly available, self-healing and fully fault-tolerant with auto-recovery," explained Parallels CEO Birger Steen. "It looks simple. It's hard to do but conceptually it's pretty simple."

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 02/12/2013 at 12:48 PM