Two more signs it’s a hybrid cloud world: This week, Red Hat, in the process of being bought by IBM, acquired a startup that specializes in managing storage across multi-cloud environments. And Amazon launched a raft of hybrid storage services, as well as a service that allows customers to run Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud in your own data center.
Red Hat acquires data storage startup NooBaa
IBM is not expected to close the planned $34 billion purchase of Red Hat until the second half of 2019, so in the meantime, Red Hat continues on its way, grabbing cloud startups it sees as strategic. This week, it announced its acquisition of NooBaa, which specializes in managing data storage services across hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.
NooBaa claims it can collapse multiple storage silos into a single, scalable storage fabric by its ability to virtualize any local storage, whether shared or dedicated, physical or virtual, and include both private and public cloud storage. It gives full control over data placement, so users can place data based on security, strategy, and cost considerations.
NooBaa’s support for unstructured data should complement Red Hat’s OpenShift container and Ceph storage platforms, which also cover data storage across private and public clouds, particularly object storage.
Amazon announces 8 new storage offerings
Amazon, which is holding its massive AWS re:Invent conference this week, announced eight new storage services and capabilities:
- Amazon S3 Intelligent-Tiering: a new Amazon S3 storage class that automatically optimizes customers’ storage costs
- Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive: a very low-cost service, just $1 per TB per month, aimed at replacing tape backup
- Amazon S3 Batch Operations: a bulk storage management and automation feature for AWS Lambda
- Amazon FSx for Windows File Server: to help customers lift-and-shift their Windows applications to AWS
- Amazon FSx for Lustre: a fully managed file system optimized for HPC and machine learning
- Amazon EFS Infrequent: a new storage class for Amazon EFS designed for files accessed less frequently, reducing storage costs by up to 85 percent
- AWS DataSync: a data transfer service to make it easy for customers to automate moving data between on-premises storage and Amazon S3 or Amazon EFS
- AWS Transfer for SFTP: a fully managed service that enables customers to transfer files directly into and out of Amazon S3 using the Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
Amazon gets serious about hybrid cloud
All of these services reflect Amazon finally getting serious about the hybrid cloud. For the longest time, AWS had a pure cloud play mentality, and it is finally coming around to reality that most customers want or need a hybrid solution.
That’s especially true with DataSync, which the company says runs 10 times faster than as open-source data transfer schemes and automatically handles many of the tasks related to data transfers that can slow it down, such as managing scripts and handling encryption.
Another sign AWS is getting hybrid religion was the presence of VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, who joined AWS CEO Andy Jassy on stage to announce the new storage offerings and to announce VMware is building integration points into AWS Outposts, which is basically its answer to Microsoft’s Azure Stack. See our full coverage of the Outposts news here. Clearly AWS has gotten the memo about the hybrid cloud and is moving fast.