If you have been looking to simplify your storage management, you’ve probably considered cloud storage. That is a place to turn, according to Cirtas officials, as cloud storage provides economic and practical benefits.
Cirtas, a 2010 Red Herring Top 100 North America Company, aims to make cloud storage work like on–site storage arrays. To deliver robust cloud storage solutions, Cirtas recently launched the Bluejet 500, the world’s first cloud-enabled data storage system.
According to Cirtas, not only is it important to make using cloud storage easy, but with Bluejet’s Cloud Storage Controller technology, it “unlocks capabilities.”
Company officials offer a series of reasons:
Razor thin provisioning — It’s possible to achieve 100 percent capacity usage, never buy more drives and “give every user as much space as they need,” all with the Bluejet 500. Since cloud storage has consumption-based pricing, every server can be provisioned with 5TB of storage, or even 50TB, and consumers don’t have to pay anything upfront until the data is actually written.
Integrated backup — With the Bluejet 500, consumers can eliminate the need for a backup device, which can oftentimes be costly, while still maintaining “superior data protection.” Just as backups protect data against hardware failures and against logical corruption caused by users or applications, Bluejet does the same even when data is stored in the cloud.
Effortless disaster recover — Data can be brought online in just seconds by using cloud storage from anywhere on the globe. And, in the event that your primary data center goes offline, you can use a Bluejet in your recovery site to access your information, which remains safely stored in the cloud.
Data-in-place technology refreshes — Forget about copying data from old arrays and multi-month upgrade planning cycles. Upgrade anytime in minutes. And upgrading to a newer Bluejet model doesn’t require any data copying or advanced planning. Simply schedule a brief maintenance window, power down the existing Bluejet and replace it with the new one.
No more disk-level configuration — Bluejet leverages cloud storage so that there are no RAID groups, RAID levels, stripe sizes, or other vestiges of disk-level configurations. Setting up Bluejet will take less than 30 minutes because there is no local array of disks to manage. Bluejet’s local cache is self-managing, so all you have to do is decide what volumes you’d like to create and which host computers should have access. From shipping box to production can be accomplished in well under one hour.
In other Cirtas news, the cloud storage solutions provider recently published the Taneja Group white paper which discusses how the cloud storage industry is booming and key solutions providers, such as Cirtas, are reaping the benefits of growing opportunities in this space.
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Carrie Schmelkin