A new cloud storage service from Revera has been launched with the sole aim of encouraging local organisations to reconsider once prohibitively expensive petabyte, or even exabyte-sized projects.
Labelled Vault, Revera’s new object-based storage service provides a range of storage options at prices similar to Amazon Simple Storage (AWS S3) - but unlike AWS S3, the Spark New Zealand owned company claims that “extracting data from Vault doesn’t cost extra.”
“Vault changes the economics of managing super-sized data volumes - a market once served by pricier traditional block and file-based storage platforms,” says Stephen Ponsford, CTO representative, Revera.
“Feedback from government IaaS clients and science-based organisations highlighted a backlog of digital projects that didn’t stack up financially.
“There’s a whole lot of data sitting in silos, on external drives, even stacked on shelves waiting for a platform where data can be managed and mined economically.
“In some cases organisations are destroying data simply because keeping it is too expensive. They’re even prepared to forgo potential value that could be mined from it in the future.”
However, Ponsford says Vault wasn’t an attempt to wrestle business from AWS or other cloud storage behemoths.
Rather, he says Vault addressed customer demand for hybrid cloud services. For this reason Vault is compatible with Amazon’s S3 connector, allowing customers to point data on either platform.
“It’s all about customer choice. Vault provides a compatible New Zealand alternative for cloud data,” he adds. “Customers can shift data between AWS and Vault, and there’s no need to redevelop for our platform.
“Vault data integrates seamlessly with databases, content systems and applications.”
According to Ponsford, some organisations will naturally gravitate to an in-country service, with sovereignty requirements excluding public platforms and pricier international bandwidth swinging the numbers in Vault’s favour.
“But either way, there’s a strong case for both platforms and we’re simply providing a pathway to both,” he adds.
Ponsford add that Vault, and for that matter AWS, changed accepted models of enterprise data management - a model typified by disk-to-disk replication with tape completing the trifecta.
“But tape is fast becoming the dinosaur of storage media as cloud services deliver unlimited scale and flexible object-based storage systems,” he adds.
Jointly developed with Revera’s long-term storage partner Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Vault adds to Revera’s growing portfolio of plug-and-play services that have reshaped the former computing infrastructure specialist as a hybrid cloud services provider.
Earlier this year Revera launched a dedicated Microsoft Azure-enabled platform called Apollo, bringing locally hosted and managed Azure-enabled cloud infrastructure and platform services to New Zealand organisations for the first time.
