Grazed from ITBrief. Author: Julia Gabel.

The latest analysis on cloud pricing by 451 Research highlights that the cloud price battle field has shifted from virtual machines (VMs) to object storage. And the firm predicts that other services, particularly databases, will undergo the same pricing pressures over the next 18 months. 451 Research says that virtual machines have been the traditional battleground for price cuts as providers seek to gain attention and differentiation.

But now, the tide has turned as object storage pricing declines, including a drop of 14% over the past 12 months. For comparison, the cloud mainstay of virtual machines has dropped a relatively small 5% over the same period. The analysts believe that the move of price cuts beyond compute is due to market maturity. Other factors include increasing cloud-native development and faith in the cloud model, as well as a competitive scrum to capture data migrating out of on-premises infrastructure...

Read more from the source @ https://itbrief.com.au/story/war-cloud-pricing-object-storage-moves-mainstream/

Grazed from Zadara Storage

Zadara Storage, the provider of enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS), and Futong today announced the availability of Zadara's award-winning VPSA Storage Array at the Beijing Sinnet Technology Co., Ltd data center, supporting the AWS Beijing region. Zadara has previously announced regional support following AWS expansion into Dublin, Sydney, Tokyo, Frankfurt and South Korea.

The rapidly growing China market is creating a need for massive amounts of high-performance, enterprise-class storage. IT professionals are quickly realizing that traditional Capital Expense-based (CapEx) storage does not meet their scalability and cost targets. Zadara Storage, with its Operating Expense-based (OpEx) solution provides a cost-effective, infinitely scalable, block (SAN), file (NAS) and Object Storage-as-a-Service solution. The Zadara Storage Cloud enables companies doing business in China the ability to leverage the flexibility and economic benefits of public and private cloud architectures as they grow their infrastructures.

SwiftStack, a company that powers hybrid cloud storage for enterprises, today announced availability of its latest software release, SwiftStack 5, which will be demonstrated at the Google Cloud Next Conference 2017, March 8 through March 10 in San Francisco, at booth #A4. One notable enhancement to its Cloud Sync feature is the ability to replicate data bidirectionally between the four Google Cloud Storage offerings, as well as other cloud provider's solutions. Two-way synchronization of data stored between on-premises and the public cloud is managed as a policy controlled by IT, so data is automatically delivered to where it can best be computed on or utilized, within private data centers or in the public cloud.

"We believe that enterprises now and  for the foreseeable future will live in a hybrid cloud world, where business value should determine where data lives, when it moves and how it behaves," said Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "IT creates and controls the policies for corporate data that places data on-premises and/or in the public cloud, based on the criteria that keeps their customers happy: cost, performance, security, access and availability." More about Duplessie's view on multi-cloud data management can be found in this short video:http://learn.swiftstack.com/2017-esg-multi-cloud-data-management.html.

Scality today announced its new Scality HALO Cloud Monitor, a turnkey 24/7 monitoring solution for the Scality RING object storage platform and S3-focused products. Scality HALO provides customers continuous uptime for their managed private cloud storage environments and delivers transformative analytics to help streamline business operations.

"Our Scality RING system is designed to be 100 percent available and now with Scality HALO we have the cloud monitoring assurance for customers to guarantee 100 percent uptime for their Scality RING and S3 environments," said Daniel Binsfeld, VP of DevOps and Global Support at Scality. "Our customers, both Service Providers and Enterprise companies, must deliver on strong Service Level Agreements to their users. With Scality HALO we provide peace of mind and confidence that downtime can become a thing of the past for everyone."

Grazed from BusinessWire. Author: Editorial Staff.

Warehouse TERRADA (Shinagawa, Tokyo / CEO: Yoshihisa Nakano) announces that we will begin offering its “minikura” cloud storage system, where any user can have his/her own warehouse, one box at a time, to users outside of Japan. Since the foundation in 1950, Warehouse TERRADA has been cultivating better storage techniques and making proactive action on the capital investment in order to store and preserve items under the best environment.

Expanding our business beyond the traditional warehousing, we are currently pursuing the preservation and restoration techniques to raise the value of items that require high expertise such as wines, artworks and media and pass it on to the next generations. Also we are developing a business to output the new culture by making a full use of our knowledge as a professional in space creation...

Grazed from PCWorld. Author: Peter Sayer.

Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have agreed to give cloud storage subscribers fairer contracts after intervention by the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority. Such cloud storage services are typically used to store photos, videos, music or digital copies of important documents. If the services shut down or vary their capacity or prices without notice, customers can lose their data, or be held hostage.

The CMA asked the storage service providers to give adequate notice before closing, suspending or changing services, and to allow customers to cancel their contracts and receive a pro-rata refund if they didn't accept service changes. The regulator last year obtained similar undertakings from Google, Dropbox and five other cloud storage providers...

Today, Right Move Storage, LLC and VaultDrop, LLC announced the implementation of their new Free Unlimited Cloud Storage product for all customers at properties operated by Right Move Storage. By combining traditional self storage with free unlimited cloud storage, Right Move Storage is accommodating all of their customers' needs by providing safe, secure cloud and physical storage.

"This is a ground-breaking idea," said Darren Kelley, President of Right Move Storage. "It was first presented to me by A.J. Esmailzadeh, Co-Founder of VaultDrop, LLC. We began working together to offer storage owners a unique product which creates incremental revenue and profit for the owner, while also providing an amenity to help them gain and retain customers."

An independent survey commissioned by Zadara Storage, the provider of enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS), has underscored the IT industry's need for symmetrically scalable cloud storage, that can instantly scale up or down to meet business requirements, as a key challenge to growth in 2017 - and corroborates other recent analyses of IT demands for storage scalability in the coming year.

When asked to share their top strategy for managing their organization's data storage in 2017, one third of IT decision makers responding in Germany, the UK and the US, ranked "having cloud storage that scales up or down according to my organization's needs" as their #1 wish in 2017. Scalability was cited by nearly twice as many as those who selected the next highest response, outranking other mission-critical IT demands. The 2017 wish list unveiled by this research included:

Cloudian, Inc., a leading provider of hybrid cloud object storage, has announced that Purity IT, a storage and cloud services provider in Norway, has deployed its HyperStore solution as a key component of its new S3-based public cloud offering.

Based in Oslo, Purity IT is a leading regional provider of backup, disaster recovery and cloud storage services. They have built a public multi-site S3 service based on Cloudian HyperStore. The new service, which also offers local SAN cache and tiering to tape, is intended for use cases including primary storage, archiving and backup.

Cloudian HyperStore was selected ahead of technology from Scality, Red Hat, and Quantum, following a five month proof of concept comparison project. The competing solutions were tested on the following criteria: ease of use, data tiering capabilities, storage policy support, S3 API interoperability, scalability, security, and cost.

Panzura, the leader in hybrid cloud storage, today announced a new $32 million growth capital round led by Matrix Partners and joined by Meritech Capital Partners, Opus Capital, Chevron and Western Digital as well as an undisclosed strategic investor. The new financing will be used to scale Panzura's leadership in leading the massive transformation of the $32B on premise storage market spend to a cloud first storage model. The monies will also be used to expand Panzura's hybrid cloud storage offerings for high performance database and virtual workloads, big data analytics and Internet of Thing (IoT) applications.

Panzura had record growth in 2016, including adding over 100 new enterprise customers and expanding its channel and alliance presence with leading cloud providers AWS, Google, IBM and Microsoft Azure. Panzura added over 26 new petabytes of enterprise storage in 2016 and its hybrid cloud NAS, archive and collaboration storage products were deployed in over 33 countries across multiple industries and governments.