If you listen to some pundits, soon everything will be in the cloud as we inexorably free ourselves from the hassles of on-premises computing. If pundits were always right, Thomas Dewey would have been president. But reality is different from prognostication and on-premises computing is alive and well.
Cloud backup and recovery player Infrascale read the tea leaves (meaning it talked to potential customers) and found an appetite for the Infrascale software, but in some cases just not in the public cloud.
Based on that feedback, Infrascale today unveiled a version of its SOS Backup for hosted or managed private clouds. SOS Backup is now offered in a white label, on-premises basis so MSPs can basically sell it as their own offering.
The company says partners, including MSPs, have been asking for this option. And so have IT clients. In fact, Infrascale pointed to IDC research indicating that more than half of IT pros surveyed believe that hosted private clouds are more secure that publicly hosted clouds, a view that certainly makes intuitive and perhaps obvious sense.
"In 2012, we saw an increase in customers wanting to take advantage of our software, but to have the control over the cloud," said Ken Shaw, CEO of Infrascale. "We've put over 100 man-years into development of our dashboard and our online backup application. Our partners now have the ability to take the power of that secure online backup application, re-brand for their firm, and host it in the data center of their – or their customers' – choice. Our objective has always been to integrate with our partners' businesses. Offering private cloud deployment of our application is yet another way to do just that."
In the backup space, this privatization runs contrary to the direction much of the industry is running in. The holy grail of today’s backup is hybrid cloud or disk to disk to cloud (d2d2c). Here the standard in-house backup to disk still takes place, but the second tier, the real safety net, is in the cloud. This is particularly attractive for SMBs who can save on storage infrastructure, IT management time and expenses as the cloud provider takes full care of the secondary backup.
But large shops are more wary, and perhaps spooked by well-publicized data breaches.
In the Beginning
Like the original Compaq Computer (remember that sweet but big portable), Infrascale designed its cloud platform on a napkin. Instead of the early 80’s as with Compaq, Infrascale sketched its vision eight years ago in a Thai restaurant.
“The idea we drew out that night was for a distributed file and document management system made up of millions of heterogeneous end-points or "leaf" nodes (our users), connected to hundreds of distributed compute and storage servers (our "grid"), all controlled by a command-and-control system that sat at the middle of the network (the Infrascale application itself),” the company explained. “Imagine a logically central node, surrounded by hundreds of server nodes, surrounded by millions of end-points that leverage those server nodes.”
That same “semi-intelligent grid” architecture is what the company still uses across its 11 data centers.
Edited by
Jamie Epstein
