ESG Blogs

This morning, NetApp announced AltaVault—the next iteration of what was Riverbed SteelStore, which was acquired in 2014.

Continuing our four-Friday video series, based on the recent ESG research report on the Shift toward Data Protection Appliances,   

This installment covers cloud gateway appliances that are designed to be part of a data protection strategy. Early DP cloud gateways have a similar value-proposition as mainstream deduplication storage appliances in that they can be added to existing (or new) backup and archival infrastructures and automagically and radically reduce storage consumption through optimized protection storage. Typically, these gateways utilize a combination of fast local storage for immediate restores that then offloads previous versions and older copies to cloud-storage. 

The market has been waiting for EMC to acquire a cloud gateway company, but for years the speculation was it would be acquired by the cloud division as a data onboarding tool for Atmos. Today EMC announced the acquisition of Natick MA- based TwinStrata by the storage division as a part of its VMAX strategy. This is indeed an intriguing and smart move. EMC VMAX embedding a gateway allows EMC to leverage its FAST tiering technology to add a cloud tier. Of course, there is certainly broader potential for the technology to be leveraged across EMC divisions longer term. This will just be the first instantiation of the technology. It also fits well with the cloud-like attributes of the new, third generation VMAX, which introduces storage services and flexible CUP resources that can be allocated in an elastic manner to support front or back-end storage processes.

The big question of the day is whether the AWS announcement of a cloud storage gateway (one of the worst kept secrets in tech) will validate or kill the existing gateway market. And that's a good question. For now it is a great validation that users are looking for a standards-based way to access the cloud for certain use cases. And we do see storage services adoption ramping up. In our 2012 spending intentions survey (coming soon, but I got a preview of the data that will be included), 51% of the respondents said they are using or plan to use Infrastructure as a Service (that is up from the 35% of respondents using or planning to use IaaS in last year's survey). Of the IaaS users, the biggest use case response is cloud storage (57%).