Nicos Vekiarides, TwinStrata Chief Executive Officer, and his colleague, Anne Doyle, VP of Sales, stopped by to bring me up to date on both the company and a product it was launching, TwinStrata CloudArray 2.5. TwinStrata is one of a number of suppliers that is offering cloud-based storage solutions.
New market segment, but beginning to coalesce
Although this is a relatively new phenomena, it is already becoming clear how different suppliers are going to differentiate their offerings from those offered by others. Some are targeting backup, others disaster recovery and a few are suggesting that the cloud be an organization’s primary storage mechanism.
TwinStrata’s story
TwinStrata’s focus is expansion, infrastructure cost reduction and business continuity. TwinStrata’s messages are that cloud storage provides the following benefits:
- Organizations can easily match storage to their operational requirements with little additional time, no additional infrastructure and little to no administrative costs.
- Integrating cloud storage with current applications requires no application level changes
- Public and private clouds are supported.
Business continuity
TwinStrata believes that a business continuity strategy should include the use cloud storage because of its agility (it can expand and contract to support actual business requirements) and the pay-as-you-go nature of this storage helps organizations pay only for what they’re actually using. The company would point out that most organizations purchase more storage than actually needed for today’s operations because they are trying to address the possibility that their future needs will require additional storage.
Supporting multiple services providers, can you say Plan B and C?
As the following graphic shows, TwinStrata can support multiple cloud storage providers along with local storage making it possible for organizations to have a “plan B” and a “plan C”.
How does TwinStrata’s story stand up?
Some of TwinStrata’s competitors play the same music, sing the same tune and dance the same dance. So, my first thought was “here we go again.”
TwinStrata showed me, however, that it is able to differentiate itself from others in a number of ways:
- The feature set appears to be more extensive.
- The list of partners is impressive and includes companies such as AT&T (Synaptic Storage as a Service), Amazon Web Services (Amazon S3 cloud storage), EMC (Velocity Atmos), Windstream, Mezeo and a number of others
- The company actually has customers using the technology
In spite of my curmudgeonly analyst ways, I was impressed. You just might be won over to if you take the time to look them over.
