
ClearSky Data Exits Stealth with Novel Approach to Cloud Storage - colanderman
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/24/clearsky-data-exits-stealth-to-deliver-data-lifecycle-as-a-service/
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sigil
How does this differ from the AWS Storage Gateway appliance?
[https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/](https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/)

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colanderman
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.

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

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colanderman
Correct, with latencies competitive with existing enterprise storage
solutions.

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PhantomGremlin
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.

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colanderman
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 ;)

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

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colanderman
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.

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Thetawaves
[http://www.csky.com/](http://www.csky.com/)

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alex1982
We are [http://www.clearskydata.com](http://www.clearskydata.com)

Nothing to do with the company you listed above :)

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

And why hasn't TechCrunch asked these questions?

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colanderman
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.

