SCIENCE

Cirtas Systems emerged from stealth to publicly unveil its Bluejet Cloud Storage Controllers after successful completion of a beta program with more than a dozen enterprise customers across diverse markets. Cirtas Bluejet technology unites proven WAN optimization techniques with advanced virtualized storage array capabilities to deliver the world's first cloud-enabled storage system. The solution goes beyond simply opening a gateway to the cloud to actually harness and control it, analogous to the way enterprise storage array controllers manage the shelves of attached disk drives. Cirtas has secured strategic alliances with leading cloud storage providers, including Amazon (a Series A investor in the company) and Iron Mountain, among others, which enables its users to mix and match services across cloud storage platforms to create hybrid solutions that are tailored to their specific needs.

"Iron Mountain's Archive Services Platform was designed to meet the needs of independent software vendors looking to integrate secure cloud storage and cloud information management functionality into their solution," said Jaimin Patel, director of developer programs for Iron Mountain. "Cirtas Bluejet makes migrating data to the cloud fast and painless, and perfectly complements our portfolio of cloud storage and information management services. Together, Cirtas and Iron Mountain offer enterprise customers an integrated cloud solution that is easy to implement and manage, while ensuring stored information is accessible and secure."

Bluejet's market potential has already received some early validation: the company received its first purchase order from beta-user-turned-customer Robert Half International, prior to the product's general market availability.

Making Cloud Storage Viable for the Enterprise Cirtas' ground-breaking Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller technology addresses IT administrator concerns about cloud storage and bridges the gap between the ROI promise of the cloud and stringent enterprise IT requirements. Despite the many potential benefits of cloud storage -- massive cost savings, increased accessibility and manageability -- it has been faced with skepticism from many IT managers. Until Cirtas Cloud Storage Controller technology was developed, concerns over security, compatibility, availability, performance, cloud storage provider lock-in, and verifiable reductions in total cost of ownership (TCO) had yet to be addressed by vendors in a meaningful way, deterring enterprise adoption.

"Public cloud storage has many attractive attributes -- no hardware or software to buy or manage, the ability to scale up or down on-demand, and inexpensive pricing -- but it isn't without its challenges: security, application compatibility, and performance to name only a few," said Adam Couture, research director at Gartner. "Cloud storage controller technology addresses much of the functionality needed to utilize cloud storage in a manner consistent with on-site storage. Hybrid cloud storage models -- on-premise controllers combined with public cloud storage -- can deliver capabilities not possible with on-site storage such as the ability to easily move data from one service provider to another to attain better pricing."

Cirtas' approach to cloud storage addresses challenges inherent to physical storage solutions, making capacity growth, backup, and disaster recovery issues a thing of the past. Bluejet is an enterprise-ready solution that makes public cloud storage work like on-site storage arrays, but ups the ante with increased security, performance, manageability, and cost savings over its legacy counterparts.

"Advanced WAN optimization techniques are at the core of our Bluejet technology, and key to how Cirtas delivers substantially lowered storage total cost of ownership," said Josh Goldstein, vice president of marketing and product management at Cirtas Systems. "These techniques combined with several others are what elevate Bluejet from a simple cloud gateway device to a Cloud Storage Controller that is truly enterprise class. Without the power they provide, IT departments can't always demonstrate true TCO reductions with cloud storage and performance won't be sufficient to make the end-user experience transparent."

Key technology features and benefits of Cirtas Bluejet include:

• CloudLock Data Security: Securely encrypts all data in transit to and at rest in the cloud, ensuring only authorized users have access to stored information. Even if a security breach occurs at the cloud provider level, Bluejet's CloudLock Data Security prevents data from being read or used. Administrators can define which servers and users are allowed to access information.
• CloudCache and CloudReduce: CloudCache is a high-speed, automated tiered cache spanning RAM, SSD, and spinning disk to accelerate the end-user experience, and improve performance by keeping frequently accessed data on the Bluejet appliance to reduce the need for data retrieval from the cloud. CloudReduce provides reduction technology that de-duplicates and compresses data prior to transmission to the cloud. Together, CloudReduce and CloudCache increase the speed of data transfers both to and from the cloud, while actively reducing associated service fees.
• CloudSnap: Provides users with unlimited, fully automated and space-efficient snapshots of data stored in the cloud, enabling easy recovery from user and application errors; eliminates the need to perform separate backups of primary data stored on Bluejet.
• CloudConnect: Facilitates use of multiple cloud providers, making it simple to spread data across multiple cloud platforms and eliminating the need to rewrite applications to proprietary cloud storage APIs. Provides a standard iSCSI interface to servers.
• CloudForecast: Built in return-on-investment (ROI) calculator provides on-demand insights into cloud storage costs on a volume-by-volume basis, with real time, 'ROI-on-the-fly' reporting for chargeback accounting.
• Virtualized Storage Array Capabilities: Thin provisioning, automated tiered storage, primary storage deduplication, data encryption, snapshots and more.
• Increased Performance: Suitable as a primary storage replacement for Tier2/Tier3 applications, as well as for secondary storage and archive applications. Drives up to 1Gbps to the cloud.
• Enterprise Grade, Redundant Components: Includes journaled write paths, built in RAID protection for cached data and high-performance appliance design.
• Rapid Deployment: Cirtas Bluejet is easy to setup and is customer installable; beta users overwhelmingly reported 60 minutes or less to deploy -- from unpacking the system to provisioning storage to their hosts and writing/reading data.