Cloud gateway decline, cloud controller will rise

"The term 'gateway' has been deliberately avoided by start-up companies, and actually it started off pretty well and all of the essence of it was on its way to the cloud," said Arun Taneja, founder and principal consultant at Taneja Group . "To be honest, None of them knew what they wanted to be when they grew up and they did not find a use case. " As the cloud storage market continues to evolve, vendors are not just positioning themselves as putting data in the cloud, they see themselves as EMC A competitor to a company like NetApp.

Some startups sprouted about three years ago and sold the gateway as an easy way to bring customers into the cloud. Including Ctera Networks, Nasuni, Panzura, StorSimple, TwinStrata, Microsoft acquired StorSimple in late 2012.

Now these companies are seeking to enter the business, so they need business performance. In December, Panzura conducted a multi-million dollar deal with the U.S. Office of Law Enforcement, which industry analysts see as a huge success that is likely to open the door to business in other governance areas. Panzura attributes the success of the transaction to global cloud storage systems and has received the Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 Security Certification.

Panzura CEO Randy Chou said he sees NetApp as its chief competitor rather than the other "gateway" vendors as Panzura prefers to look for enterprise-class network attached storage (NAS) as its primary storage customer.

"I think the entire market was hurt by the terminology gateway," Chou said. "Let's go backwards." He prefers "cloud controllers" or "cloud storage controllers."

Panzura is not the only vendor looking to become a full service storage vendor. Cloud controller vendors all claim that the only difference between their storage systems and EMC or NetApp is that they move data to the cloud rather than to a local disk array.

"The original cloud gateway vendor plan was for them to support us and we moved it to the cloud," said Marc Staimer, founder and senior analyst at Dragon Slayer Consulting. "If I could go to the cloud with NetApp or EMC, why am I still thinking about it? But if I come in and say I'm competing with EMC, all I have to do in this way is move the data to the cloud, and I put the data in the cloud in a different way than EMC, which is different The place. "

So what's the difference between a legacy gateway and a current controller? "Cloud-integrated snapshots, cloud-integrated replication, inline deduplication, inline compression, and WAN optimization come to be named," Taneja said of many gateway providers .

These cloud controllers work in different markets and have a variety of strengths. "The reality is that for everyone, Amazon might be looking forward to, not a feature under development," Taneja said. "TwinStrata and Nasuni have split into primary storage and Panzura is on the road to collaboration. Say 'put us in front of the cloud, a variety of different clouds, place us on demand and we'll give you a collaboration product.' The end result is that they have the best collaboration products in the marketplace. '

Recent FIPS certification by Panzura is time-consuming and expensive; third parties must review the encryption password to ensure that it passes. "I've given them a lot of prestige," said Staimer of Dragon Slayer Consulting. "It opened the market for them."

No one is specific What Microsoft will do to StorSimple, a cloud-based storage appliance or "cloud SAN" that advertises itself as a regular storage matrix installed on a customer's website and putting data in the cloud.

"I think it's clear the future for these guys," Taneja said, "but none of them want EMC or NetApp to buy them, and those guys are bad for the matrix business."

Whatever the thinking of vendors and analysts, not all customers deny terminology gateways. Christopher Butler, Director of Information Services at St. John's Prep, runs the TwinStrata CloudArray as a virtual appliance that links Amazon S3 back up. Butler said he can get out of the cloud with the cloud. He would not use CloudArray as the primary storage, but said he would like this option if his storage needs grow.

"I think it's a gateway," Butler said. "We're using thin devices. It's accelerating another VM's problem, linking iSCSI LUNs, and now my storage has a dynamic inventory. I see it as a gateway, How much storage is required. "

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