ClearSky is a Boston-based startup founded in 2014 by industry veterans Lazarus Vekiarides and Ellen Rubin; ClearSky comes with a unique proposition, which – if successful – might revolutionize the way primary storage is consumed. I introduced ClearSky in my previous TFD14 preview article where I described their solution; the objective is to reduce drastically the Data Center footprint of traditional primary storage by shifting it to the Cloud while at the same time simplifying DR operations and ensuring accessibility of data from any location. This outcome seemed to be impossible to achieve due to the strict latency requirements that primary storage inherently carries, but ClearSky has found an elegant and effective solution to this conundrum. However, there is one caveat here and it will be evident in the following paragraph.
Next week I will fly to Boston to attend my first full Tech Field Day conference as a delegate.
Last year I was lucky enough to be invited to the smaller scale Tech Field Day Extra event at VMworld Europe and I really enjoyed the experience, so you can imagine my excitement when I received the invite from Stephen and Tom to join them at TFD14.
Not yet time to pack a bag, but definitely time to start doing some research on the three vendors that will present at TFD14: ClearSky Data, Turbonomic and Datrium.
Let’s start this TFD14 Preview Series from ClearSky Data: from what I understand ClearSky has a very unusual approach to Cloud Storage which is normally intended for secondary/object storage kind of use cases. ClearSky has developed an interesting architecture that allows for storing all your data in the cloud while not sacrificing the performance (and use cases) typical of primary storage – all of this going beyond the obvious caching technologies that have been around for some time. More »