Certainly Cirtas! Cloud Storage Gains Momentum

I’ve been talking about Cloud Storage Gateways off and on, and F5 doesn’t have any reason to care one way or the other which Cloud Storage Gateways win the race, so even though I always strive to keep my blogs only biased based on merit, this one should scream at you that it is unbiased. I’m not bucking for a new job (F5 really does rock as an employer overall), we’re not in the space, but we do care about the space because our ARX box can take a Cloud Storage Gateway and treat it like a NAS… Presuming it’s well designed anyway. And that gives us yet another tier we can drop files into and give you another option for shadow copies, etc. But which Cloud Storage Gateway you choose only matters to us if they don’t work like a NAS, and that would be a pretty silly CSG at this point.

So to review, a Cloud Storage Gateway sits in your datacenter and presents Cloud Storage as if it were a local NAS. This is really important to those of us in IT because most Cloud Storage is implemented like it was “any other cloud service” as a set of web services calls, which is about as useful in a storage environment as a rubber ball – someone might play with it, but it’s not going to be applied to many problems. Cloud Storage Gateways make that storage actually useful to the environment it is intended for.

And I’ve looked at (though unfortunately never touched) all of the products in the market, and the company with the most solid approach is absolutely Cirtas. Since they released their first product yesterday – the  BlueJet Cloud Storage Controller – it’s time to mention them and why I – and plenty of others - think they are the market leader early on. First let me head-nod to Cirtas and mention that they prefer the term Cloud Storage Controller to the slightly more popular Cloud Storage Gateway. Since this blog is mostly about them, I will use their terminology henceforth.

There are plenty of good things about each of the vendors out there, and some of them are pretty good products, but Cirtas has what I see as the perfect storm of positives to bring them into your datacenter.