Cloudian now offers native S3-compatible object storage capabilities to VMware cloud providers to expand their services to enterprise and business customers.

The new object storage capabilities are managed directly from VMware Cloud Director within the VMware cloud provider platform, Cloudian said.

The new capabilities give cloud service providers improved tools to expand a wide range of value-add services to customers, including storage as a service (STaaS), backup as a service (BaaS), archive as a service (AaaS), disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), big data as a service (BDaaS), containers as a service (CaaS) and additional software development options.

VMware cloud providers can deliver the expanded Cloudian capabilities as a storage appliance or as software-defined storage anywhere in the world, with vCloud Director managing the storage.

Cloudian’s Jon Toor

“This is an enhancement for VMware service providers,” Jon Toor, chief marketing officer for Cloudian, told Channel Futures. “It creates a new opportunity to sell products and services.”

The new capabilities give VMware cloud service providers the first S3-compatible object storage available for their use for unstructured data, Toor said. To deploy the systems, the preconfigured box from Cloudian is installed, along with a plug-in from VMware that can be downloaded from the VMware portal, and then the appliance is typically up and running the same day.

“The service providers and VMware asked for these devices,” he said. “VMware said they had service providers who wanted it and that they wanted to work with Cloudian to offer it. It’s an endorsement of S3 and the ecosystem that’s been forming around it.”

Toor said the new object storage capabilities are a big step forward for VMware service providers because they help them get to parity with huge cloud providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft Azure.

“This now lets the smaller service providers offer object storage that is every bit as capable as what the hyperscalers offer,” he said.

Cloudian Object Storage for vCloud Director should be available next month.

William Bell, executive vice president of products for Cloudian channel partner PhoenixNAP, said the new S3 object storage capabilities will be a boon for customers because they will allow them to access and manage their data and interact with it in a single pane of glass.

PhoenixNAP’s William Bell

PhoenixNAP data security cloud customers will now be able to create and manage data in the company’s object storage service directly in the vCloud Director UI, he said.

“As a large Cloudian and VMware partner today, we already leverage both partners products directly, but now our customers have an easy interaction and consumption model that is deeply integrated,” said Bell.

PhoenixNAP is an infrastructure service provider and global data center operator.

“We believe that the unification of these two partners with deep cross-platform integrations will give our customers a consumption model and storage management modality that is very competitive in the market today,” said Bell. “We think that this is going to drive significant cross-product-line interest and boost the sales of object storage to our enterprise cloud service customers.”

Analyst Scott Sinclair of Enterprise Strategy Group said the new Cloudian object storage feature for VMware service providers will be useful for …

… the channel and its customers.

“Cloudian’s object storage technology is designed to efficiently store massive amounts of data, reducing the cost and complexity of maintaining these vast data storage environments and freeing up resources for higher value services,” said Sinclair. “Any service provider that is helping its customers leverage their data to maximize their business value needs a solution like Cloudian’s,” due to its fully native S3 API compatibility.

Another key benefit of the new capabilities are that they scale as needed to meet customer and channel partner requirements, he said.

“Cloudian offers service providers the ability to start with a smaller deployment and then scale with demand while offering flexibility and choice on the hardware side, which is critical for these environments,” said Sinclair. “Other features such as multitenant resource pooling, along with billing and quality of service controls, are ideal for developing a service offering off of Cloudian’s storage architecture.