CTERA’s Director of Channel Sales for North America, Donald Fuller, and I had a wide ranging conversation about CTERA’s “cloud attached storage” devices, what resellers had to do to be prepared to deliver their products as cloud services, and what it takes for a start up to take its place on the industry radar screen.
What is cloud attached storage?
CTERA describes cloud attached storage as a storage device that can be installed on site that has the ability to help organizations create a hybrid on-premises/off-premises storage solution that extends local storage with a variety of cloud storage services without also requiring applications be changed. The benefit organizations would receive is that their data would be protected against a whole host of problems including theft, local disasters, hardware failure and human error.
What is CTERA offering?
CTERA offers a number of products designed to help organizations take advantage of the cost effectiveness of available cloud storage services and still be able to understand what is going on in the background. The company offers the following products:
- CTERA Portal — tools designed to help CTERA partners and end user organizations create a cloud storage plan; define reporting and notification plans; implement those plans; monitor their storage appliances and cloud services; and then integrate local storage with cloud services.
- Cloud Attached Storage Appliances — storage applicances designed with cloud strage access in mind. At this time, CTERA offers four different applications allowing the company to address a range of customer environments from 10 users up to 200 users. Each of these devices contains local storage which is used as a cache. Data copied to this storage is compressed, duplications are eliminated and then the data is delivered to the cloud storage service in a way that optimizes the available network bandwidth.
- CTERA uses these storage appliances to create reliable data backup and archival storage. The software appears very flexible allowing data to be recovered from local cache or cloud storage in a number of ways including: restoration of all files to a previous version and restoration of individual files or directories. Files can be downloaded from the CTERA web account via a Web Browser from anywhere.
Snapshot analysis
At this point, CTERA’s products and services look very similar to offerings coming from a number of suppliers including IceWeb, TwinStrata, Whitewater, Riverbed, StorSimple, and Nasuni. The key differentiators between these competitors and CTERA appear to be the flexibility of the CTERA’s software, the price/performance of its storage appliances and the CTERA’s channel sales model.
I am impressed with CTERA’s approach, but believe that the company clearly needs to focus on a broad set of campaigns to increase industry awareness of the company and its products, create industry interest in those products, provide enough reasons for reseller and its customers to want the CTERA solution and then make it easy to acquire the devices and software.
I look forward to speaking with the good Mr. Fuller again about his experiences helping resellers create successful cloud storage services.
