Five Cost-Effective Storage Options

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With data volumes growing exponentially, many companies are looking to save money of their storage costs. And often companies that want save money on storage look to the cloud.

Gartner estimates that customers spent approximately $109 billion on public cloud services last year. This represents a 19.6 percent growth rate over the previous year. And they expect the market will double again by 2016.

“The cloud services market is clearly a high-growth sector within the overall IT marketplace,” said Ed Anderson, research director at Gartner.

Here are five cost-effective storage options to consider–many of them related to the cloud.

Tarmin GridBank

Tarmin’s GridBank is a multi-site storage service that incorporates a transactional replication engine which synchronizes metadata and index data across any number of clouds, public or private.

“GridBank can help speed cloud deployments and addresses many of the security and management challenges that have limited wider adoption of the cloud to date,” says Shahbaz Ali, company co-founder and CEO.

GridBank’s cloud storage includes Distributed Metabase technology that optimizes global data accessibility for total management, as well as object dedupe capabilities that lower costs while addressing risk management.

Quantum Q Cloud

Quantum has released a business-class, cloud-based backup and recovery subscription service called Q-Cloud. It integrates with Symantec OpenStorage technology (OST). It backs up physical and virtual infrastructures with prices starting at 1 cent/GB/month, assuming a 15:1 deduplication ratio.

“Many businesses are struggling to find cost-effective backup and DR,” says Henrik Rosendahl, senior vice president of cloud solutions for Quantum. “Some might not even have a DR strategy in place due to lack of IT resources or budget constraints.”

Q-Cloud works two ways. Users can back up locally to a Quantum physical or virtual DXi system and replicate a copy to a DXi appliance in the cloud using Symantec Optimized Duplication (OpDup). If they don’t have a local DXi appliance, they can use OST with a free DXi Accent plug-in which deduplicates the data and only sends changes to Q-Cloud. Users can also build an archive and restore files even after the local copy has expired or been moved.

“Offering OST integration with Q-Cloud has ramifications for midrange companies that use Symantec backup software,” said Jason Buffington, senior data protection analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. “For many IT managers, this could represent an economical step from on premise backup to cloud-based backup-as-a-service.”

NovaStor NovaBackup

NovaStor has released NovaBackup 14.1, which comes with a new interface and 2 GB of complimentary cloud storage. The latest release has a wizard that walks the backup administrator through a five step process.

“User error often causes a great number of data losses, while overly complex software may prevent proper backup and restore,” says Stefan Utzinger, CEO at NovaStor. “By simplifying the user interface we ensure that users will have a functional backup process in place for the restoration when needed.”

The software works with Windows workstations and servers, as well as Hyper-V and VMware, Exchange and SQL Server.

Caringo Object Storage

The growth of big data is increasing the need for object storage, rather than file storage.

“As the appetite for storage has exploded, more companies are adopting object storage,” says Mark Goros, cofounder and CEO of Caringo. “The shift to object storage is being driven by IT trends, including the adoption of cloud services, emerging analytics applications, BYOD and mobility.”

Caringo provides backup software and services based on the Apache OpenStack and CloudStack platforms. The Caringo Object Storage Platformis built upon CAStor software that pools server and networking resources.

“As the velocity, variability and volume of data increases to petabyte scale, moving compute processes near the data, will be the most efficient way to analyze it,” says Goros. “This means that storage for most Hadoop implementations will need to be highly scalable.”

Pivot3 vSTAC

The Pivot3 vSTAC Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is an appliance that unifies storage and servers. The company claims that virtual desktops can be delivered for less than $200, that it eliminates unnecessary hardware expenses related to read caching, increases performance and that virtual desktops can be deployed in under 60 minutes.

“Many VDI solutions on the market today require a substantial up-front investment in hardware and software (in addition to the cost of third party installation and implementation,” says Olivier Thierry, CMO of Pivot3.

Optimized for VMware View Storage Accelerator, Pivot3 vSTAC VDI is designed for mid-size organizations that are looking to deploy 100 to 1500 virtual desktops. It would not be suitable for those with fewer than 100.

Drew Robb
Drew Robb
Drew Robb is a contributing writer for Datamation, Enterprise Storage Forum, eSecurity Planet, Channel Insider, and eWeek. He has been reporting on all areas of IT for more than 25 years. He has a degree from the University of Strathclyde UK (USUK), and lives in the Tampa Bay area of Florida.

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