#RoadCast2017: @ClearSkyData's New Enterprise Data Protection In The Cloud with @Ellen_Rubin and @lazvek

During ActualTech Media’s Boston #RoadCast2017 we met with more industry experts and leading companies to learn about new technology trends and the future of enterprise IT. We spoke with Laz Vekiarides, CTO & Co-Founder of ClearSky Data to learn about the company’s storage as a service offering and the newest features and data protection capabilities. Vekiarides is well acquainted with innovative storage, being a part of the EqualLogic team where he served as a Senior Engineering Manager and Architect before moving on to Dell with EqualLogic’s acquisition.
As Vekiarides explains in our interview, ClearSky Data offers a powerful metro-based service that offers cloud-based storage with the performance and capabilities of enterprise storage but with the elasticity and the pay-as-you-go economics of cloud. It’s all packaged in a 2U appliance, which is installed in the customer’s data center, that’s tied to ClearSky’s high speed, low latency private network, which in turn connects directly to Amazon’s cloud. ClearSky’s service is backed by the public cloud, which means that customers get a copy of their data offsite in Amazon’s S3 cloud.
Vekiarides tells us that ClearSky’s system is built for virtualized workloads, specifically VMware workloads, and it’s really great for very large workloads (like analytics and databases) where large amounts of data need to be stored and/or moved for data processing.
One of the newest features of ClearSky’s service is data protection, which includes secondary storage capabilities offering new and current customers DR, backup and recovery, along with a slew of test/dev functionality. These new capabilities help to further leverage the public cloud so that ClearSky Data customers no longer need offsite backup.
In case of an incident, customers can be up and running very quickly. ClearSky offers synchronous replication and with its new capabilities, customers can get a virtual version of their physical edge device, which runs in EC2 allowing customers to spin up instances for high availability inside their VPC. Vekiarides explains that this effectively creates a SAN inside their VPC connecting to Amazon instances as if it were a physical data center. It will look and act the same, in terms of performance and capabilities, Vekiarides added, but it will give customers additional options.

Why Get ClearSky Over Traditional Storage?

During our visit with ClearSky Data we also spoke with CEO and Co-Founder, Ellen Rubin. Another industry veteran, Rubin was the co-founder of CloudSwitch, a cloud enablement software company, which was acquired by Verizon.
Rubin explains ClearSky’s true value proposition and the advantages the fully managed service offers customers over traditional storage. One of the biggest perks is that ClearSky customers only pay for the storage they use – and for only one copy of the data, even with the new data protection capabilities. What’s more, the data is available wherever they need it through the ClearSky service.
Rubin also talks about additional benefits and capabilities that ClearSky’s SLA-based service offers, including data locality, security, encryption, key management and compliance. Rubin also touches on the crucial network component that’s truly the cherry on top of everything the company offers.
ClearSky’s goal is clearly to make it very easy for large enterprises to move their entire data centers into the cloud. With the new data protection capabilities, the company is getting one step closer to reaching it.

To learn more about ClearSky Data and get a free trial, click here