TwinStrata Adds File Sharing To Cloud Storage

Cloud-integrated storage solutions specialist TwinStrata announced the general availability of the latest release of its CloudArray software, which offers broader file access capabilities, file sharing across sites, secure bulk ingestion and cloud-to-cloud migration.

Offered as part of a cloud storage bundle, the CloudArray Cloud Storage Subscription starts at $0.19 (12p) per gigabyte per month and includes all the costs of cloud storage, associated transfer fees and the CloudArray software.

‘Bring Your Own Cloud’

The company also offers a software-only “Bring Your Own Cloud” subscription, which starts at $99 per month for 1TB. TwinStrata’s software-defined storage architecture can span multiple locations and compute clouds for sharing data between geographically distributed users, enabling users to select the appropriate topology for each file share, whether optimised for locally biased data access or distributed multisite data access.

“Many of the companies we work with today want to put significant amounts of primary data in the cloud. This is no longer about just backup and archive – they want a robust solution that can satisfy all their storage needs,” Michael Queenan, director at Nephos Technologies, said in a statement. “The new version of CloudArray not only offers our customers the NAS and SAN capabilities they demand, it also gets their data up more quickly and insulates them from the risk of vendor lock-in.”

CloudArray supports NFS v3 and v4 using both AUTH_SYS and Kerberos security models. With the extension, TwinStrata has broadened connectivity for block and file-based access to object storage without any need to modify existing applications or processes.

“Our customers are demanding greater sophistication and control over their cloud storage environments. Just getting them to the cloud is no longer enough – users want to store more data with reduced administration and more robust functionality than their on-premises storage systems,” Nicos Vekiarides, founder and chief executive of TwinStrata, said in a statement. “With this release, we’ve continued to break down the barriers to using the cloud for all your storage needs.”

Diversification

Highlights of the new cloud migration feature include the ability to change or diversify cloud providers to reduce technology risk, satisfy compliance obligations, gain better pricing or improve security, as well as selective migration of data volumes or file shares to long-term archive solutions such as EVault LTS2.

The release also offers a choice of cloud migration policies, including those that use cloud bandwidth instead of local networks.

In addition, CloudArray offers improved usability, dashboard and controls throughout the product to better analyse and tune cloud storage environments.

The update also allows users to utilise more granular statistics to give organisations improved control over each application, facilitating performance optimisation through dynamic balancing of cache resources.

Fully encrypted data can be shipped to a choice of cloud providers without the need to share encryption keys with any party or provider, reducing risk during transit. The feature also allows users to access the data directly from the new cloud provider.

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Originally published on eWeek.