ClearSky Data Exits Stealth with Novel Approach to Cloud Storage | Hacker News Reader

ClearSky Data Exits Stealth with Novel Approach to Cloud Storage

techcrunch.com

23 pointscolanderman12 comments

How does this differ from the AWS Storage Gateway appliance? https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/

Good question. I am but a lowly engineer here but my understanding of AWS Storage Gateway is that it relies on your on-premises gateway to ensure the durability of at least a portion of each write's lifetime. If your gateway goes down, it can lose data with it.

Our (ClearSky Data's) product takes full responsibility for the durability of data. If the on-premises edge cache (which we manage) fails, no data is lost.

Edit: Moreover, we fully manage the edge cache -- with AWS Storage Gateway, it is the customer's responsibility to provision and manage the gateway and its connection to the cloud.

Thanks. So with ClearSky Data, you write through to the cloud and only acknowledge once it's completed there?

Correct, with latencies competitive with existing enterprise storage solutions.

Fundamentally a good idea, but ...

They're asking companies to trust a 30 employee startup with vital company data. The engineering might be sound, but they'd better have some outstanding sales people as well, since using ClearSky requires a big leap of faith.

Most of the senior staff have prior experience building successful enterprise-storage solutions from the ground up. You're trusting your data to some of the best engineers in the industry.

And I have full faith in our sales team to communicate that fact to potential customers ;)

As somebody who has dealt with ClearSky in another industry, I wouldn't touch anything they do with a 10 foot pole.

I'm curious what you mean by this; ClearSky Data has only existed for two years and has always been in the enterprise storage industry.

http://www.csky.com/

We are http://www.clearskydata.com

Nothing to do with the company you listed above :)

Doesn't the Nasuni Filer do something very similar to this?

And why hasn't TechCrunch asked these questions?

Nasuni has done their best job to hide any pricing or performance info on their web site, but from what I can gather from Google, our prices are far more competitive than theirs.

From what I can tell, a Nasuni device connects directly to cloud providers over the public Internet, and does not ship with a high-availability solution. At ClearSky, our metro Points of Presence ensure low latency by decreasing the distance across the public Internet which customer data has to travel, and our Edge Caches are designed to be highly available.

Finally Nasuni seems to leave management and purchase of the on-premises server up to the customer. ClearSky's Edge Caches are fully managed by us at no additional cost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com