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A first look at ClearSky Data

I had a heads-up recently on a new company, ClearSky Data, who only exited stealth today. I want to make it clear that I have not yet been briefed by the folks from ClearSky, but I am definitely hoping to chat with them at VMworld 2015 (they’ll be at booth 441). Therefore a lot of what I have in this post is conjecture on my behalf. It seems to me that their goal is to help change how enterprise IT teams buy, manage and optimize their storage. Instead of consuming traditional storage arrays (alongside backup and disaster recovery (DR) infrastructure) in data centers, they want customers to reconsider another approach with ClearSky. However they do realize that while the current storage clouds offer great scalability and economics for archives and infrequently used data, they’re not so good for primary storage workloads. So how can this be addressed?

And I think this is where ClearSky Data come in. ClearSky are providing a “global storage network”. They will manage your data for you, and optimize hot, warm and cold data. The secret sauce is that ClearSky’s software has the ability to cache data as “hot” (store it locally with a customer’s applications) or “warm” (cached in ClearSky storage inside a data center close to the customer) or “cold” (somewhere not so close I guess).

I had a quick look at what they offer. In a nutshell, it’s an SLA-driven, fully managed set of storage services  for enterprise customers:

So a lot of claims here. Lots of question in my mind for sure. As I said, I have not yet been briefed by them but I do hope to catch up with them at VMworld next week and learn a little more about what they do. Read more about them here on the ClearSky Data website.

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