– Josh Goldstein, Vice President of Marketing & Product Management at Cirtas Systems (www.cirtas.com), says:
The Cirtas Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller is useful in today’s enterprise data center because it resolves the issues surrounding rapid growth of data storage capacity and associated data protection costs. By harnessing the power of public cloud storage utilities, Bluejet frees up data center rack space and substantially reduces power and cooling requirements. To servers and applications, Bluejet looks like an on-premise storage array accessed using iSCSI, NFS (network file system) or CIFS (common internet File system), ensuring compatibility and making deploying storage in the cloud a simple task that can be completed in well under an hour.
Storage and data protection costs are one of the largest components of data center capital and operational costs. Bluejet provides near-CDP (continuous data protection) of data, obviating the need for separate backup and disaster recovery solutions. Data is inherently protected as soon as it is stored on Bluejet. This frees IT from the cost and complexity of managing backups, allowing valuable resources to be focused on other tasks and projects.
The biggest challenge IT managers face with respect to Bluejet is helping legal and compliance officers understand the safety of storing information in the cloud. There are many common misconceptions about how cloud providers store information.
IT managers can engage Cirtas and our cloud provider partners to explain how the cloud works. Also, Bluejet encrypts all data on-premise prior to sending it to the cloud, providing a security model that is superior to most on-premise storage.
In our case, there are not a plethora of similar solutions to choose from, only alternative (and traditional) ways of addressing the challenge of capacity growth. Bluejet is disruptive technology because it appears and is managed like traditional storage systems, but through the power of the cloud brings new capabilities to the data center that can’t be replicated by traditional storage technologies.
