This MSP Today scribe is old enough to remember how databases were in the 80’s, but fortunately not so old as to have forgotten.
DBMS systems held records as numbers, names, etc. – all in character and text form. And they were either flat file-based or relational, the later largely using the rows and columns metaphor.
Look around today. How much of our data is names and numbers? Today we have documents, images, video, rich formats, etc. – data is no longer abstracted as numbers, but truly represents itself – as those documents, images, and video themselves. That is where databases for unstructured data and object databases all came from.
Tier 3 hopes to bring this approach to a whole new level. Its new distributed object storage service is all in the cloud, and all these objects are protected and made highly available through data center redundancy. In fact, the data is replicated to a physically separate second data center – and this happens automatically.
Meanwhile, monthly fees are based on how much data is stored.
Object storage from Tier 3 offers multi-datacenter replication natively, so high availability is already built-in.
The new service is all driven by Riak CS Enterprise from Basho. Riak CS is an open source storage platform appropriate for either private or public clouds. It is designed for fault tolerance, to handle objects and to support multi-tenant use.
The company was launched 5 years ago by a group of engineers from Akamai. Tier 3 sees its solution as perfect for archiving and backup.
“Object storage in the cloud has proven to be a best practice for real-time data backups and archiving. With the launch of this service, Tier 3 has added a layer of enterprise-grade capabilities on object storage, with automatic redundancy to a second geographic location,” said Jared Wray, founder and CTO of Tier 3. “Partnering with Basho has allowed us to provide enterprises with a simple, scalable storage platform for their applications and data. Furthermore, this service will support data sovereignty scenarios for sensitive data.”
Tier 3’s Wray
Channel Play
Tier 3 is aggressively going after the channel, and offers special management and branding items through its Tier 3 Cloud Reseller Edition. The company also has a wide array of services, such as backup and block storage, bandwidth, CDN, firewalls, load balancing, monitoring, VPNs and, of course, object storage. It also offers a cloud platform that includes management, orchestration and security. Managed services include applications, servers, Exchange, Lync and SQL Server.
Cloud Storage Market
Gartner is one of many research houses tracking the cloud storage market, and did so in its recent forecast: “Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2017, 1Q13 Update”. The research projects “worldwide Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS) Storage for end-user spending to grow at a 31% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), from an estimated $1.7B in 2013 to a forecast $4.9B in 2017.”
TMC recently interviewed Tier 3 on camera about its cloud infrastructure and data center solutions.
Edited by
Blaise McNamee
