Cloudian is the real S3 leader

Cloudian (www.cloudian.com), the best On-premise S3 Cloud Storage, did a fantastic presentation yesterday at the IT Press Tour. The business path for the company is pretty impressive with bookings multiplied by 3, no churn at all, 90% win ratio and some recent super deals beating some competitors that move to the marketing side of the market.
All these success is the result of a superb recruitment and a precise market strategy, thanks to Paul Turner, John Ash and of course Michael Tso, among others. One of the top recent news is the oem agreement with Lenovo, who finally even with an implicit link with IBM, has chosen Cloudian. The key reason for that is simple: Cloudian is the best S3 product for on-premise cloud storage, with S3 the de-facto market standard. For Lenovo and end-users, standards are fundamental and help for the adoption.

Michael Tso - CEO and co-founder Cloudian

The second advantage of Cloudian versus the competition is the development and positioning of the platform promoting a new SDS acronym i.e Smart Data Storage with 3 dimensions behind it: Smart Storage Operations, Smart Storage Platform and Smart Storage Analytics. HyperStore is a very comprehensive storage platform, available as a software or as an appliance, and from the PAM - Protect Access and Manage - criteria, is among the few best ones.
When Cloudian needs to develop new feature, they adopt a common sense attitude and the company understands for a long time that the differentiator is not only the feature itself but the recognized technology behind it with a time to market dimension. Cassandra and Redis are 2 good examples for that, Cloudian uses the first DB solution for metadata and the second one for user credentials. Among the long list of new features, here is an extract:

• Now for the metadata search, Cloudian has integrated ElasticSearch within the product and everything is masked for a superb result.
• Same thing for the Analytics part with the integration of Spark. These 2 examples are also good illustrations of the power of open source at scale.
• Storage policies at the bucket level.
• QoS and Secure Storage with alignement with some regulations needs plus Authorization and Authentication methods such ACL...
• We had the privilege during the session to receive a demo of the product, the GUI is just a beauty, super intuitive and very easy to use. There is also a panel with an hardware view where you can see the physical reality of different components, super useful when there is a failure especially when the cluster is big, very big.
• Cloudian has also an interesting rolling upgrade method, provides a pro-active disk repair mechanism with Read-On-Repair operation and Smart Redirect during writes. HyperStore offers a Smart Disk Balancing mechanism to optimize the balancing period and address new available resources faster.
• They also provide a Cloud to Cloud copy i.e HyperStore to HyperStore or HyperStore to AWS.
• As a true believer of the ecosystem, I was instrumental in the success of some companies with that kind of program I built, Cloudian has made a good demo with CommVault Simpana via S3 and Veeam via NFS, super simple to operate.
• Now in term of support, Cloudian has introduced a continuous monitoring solution named HyperStore Smart Support, a service pretty similar to Nimble Storage InfoSight that finally serves as a reference for many implementations and vendors. The service seems to be also very comprehensive and is also integrated with Salesforce.

It was a good session, we feel and saw progress made by Cloudian in many aspects: product, operation, sales, strategy... definitely one of the top object storage solutions of the market, no doubt.