StorageCraft to unveil unified storage, backup and cloud appliances

StorageCraft plans to release a unified primary, secondary and cloud storage product with the ability to set policies on data that automate backup, data protection, performance and privacy.

That’s according to StorageCraft president Douglas Brockett, who said the company plans to release products this summer that will leverage machine learning to help customers set policies for data protection and retention, including the best location for data, whether on-premises or in the cloud.

Brockett sees the forthcoming product as slotting into a market where legacy supplier products have been left behind.

“Existing players are being turfed out – the ones that were built around specific functionality, of which many mid-market customers have three or four incumbent in primary, secondary storage, backup,” he said.

“Convergence of the infrastructure makes better sense in terms of ease of use, efficiency and the capital perspective,” he added.

It’s likely the hardware form factor will be StorageCraft’s OneBlox, scale-out object storage hardware with a NAS front end that comes as the 4312 SAS and SATA HDD-equipped with capacity of 96TB per node, and the 5210 all-flash model that packs in 38TB in 10 flash drives.

Brockett also said he believes hybrid cloud will be the way things will go for the foreseeable future, which will presumably come from StorageCraft’s DR-as-a-service offerings.

In terms of forthcoming products, to be announced during the summer, StorageCraft will launch hardware based around on-premises and cloud storage, with built in data protection and policy-based data management.

“Unified provision of data protection and converged storage with a single software and hardware stack, scale-out storage with inline data deduplication and cloud connected,” said Brockett.

“It will include automated machine learning to allow people to sort through their data from the compliance, performance and privacy perspectives, to get their head around their data in all locations,” said Brockett.

StorageCraft originated as a company that sold snapshot drivers to OEM customers and later, by acquisition in 2003, added what became its ShadowProtect backup product, which majored on virtual machine data protection.

After a period in the doldrums, the company gained $187m of venture firm investment and went on to buy Exablox in 2017.

The proposed converged product line will also use IP gained in the 2016 acquisition of Gillware, namely Backup Analyzer, which uses analytics to help customers prioritise backups. The aim is that backups are made more efficient by recognising what data needs to be kept and what needn’t be backed up.