Veritas Technologies has launched Veritas Cloud Storage, a new software-defined storage solution designed for massive amounts of unstructured data. This storage solution enables customers to apply analytics, machine learning and classification technologies to stored data, which can help customers extract much greater value from their data, delivering better business outcomes and exceptional customer experiences. Veritas Cloud Storage can also help organisations accelerate their data center transformations with flexibility, agility, lower costs and no vendor lock-in. To complement this launch, Veritas also announced the Veritas Access Appliance, an integrated software-defined storage appliance that offers long-term data retention with multi-cloud capability. These solutions are available in the coming quarters.
The need for modern software-defined storage capabilities has never been more pressing as data growth and data storage costs continue to grow exponentially. According to Veritas 2017 Data Genomics Survey—which analysed more than 31 billion anonymised files globally—enterprise data repositories have grown by nearly 50 per cent (48.7 per cent) annually, largely driven by the proliferation of new apps and emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) that leverage massive data sets.1 If data continues to grow at this rate and companies do not find more efficient ways to store and manage their data, organisations worldwide may soon be confronted with storage expenses topping billions of dollars.
“With the unprecedented growth of data driving a new wave of storage demands, it is imperative that enterprises deploy a software-defined storage strategy that is optimised for cost, performance and agility,” said David Noy, vice president of product management, Veritas. “Customers also need to deploy software-defined storage solutions that turn dormant data into intelligent insights, helping businesses offer better customer experiences while delivering strong business outcomes. As one of the early pioneers in software-defined storage, Veritas has a rich heritage in this space that spans more than 25 years and with these latest innovations, we are helping customers address modern-day data challenges head-on.”
Building on the Veritas 360 Data Management platform, Veritas Cloud Storage enables enterprises adopting both on-premises and cloud-based infrastructures to realise a variety of benefits including:
- Massive scalability: Organisations can scale to petabytes, storing and managing billions of files with the ability to handle a quintillion number of objects.
- Intelligent data management: Enterprises can make storage “smart” by applying analytics, machine learning and classification technologies, offering a new level of intelligence and management to large quantities of unstructured stored data.
- Better business outcomes and customer experiences: Enterprises can use data intelligence to fuel their business, deliver highly informed recommendations to customers across a wide array of verticals, and help ensure compliance. For example, with theGeneral Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force in May 2018, enterprises can deploy this solution to quickly scan their organisation’s stored data and help ensure that sensitive information is properly tagged, managed and protected.
- Exceptional access to data globally: This solution can be geo-distributed with rich storage policies and features that provide global organisations access to the same data no matter where the sites are located.
This offering builds on Veritas’ strong heritage of providing software-defined solutions for the most demanding and critical workloads aimed at getting rid of the knot that ties organisations to expensive, legacy and proprietary storage hardware. Along with its InfoScale family of products, the recent releases of Veritas Access, Veritas HyperScale for OpenStack and Veritas HyperScale for Containers have extended Veritas’ software-defined storage support for scale-out network attached storage (NAS) and modern architectures based on containers and OpenStack architectures. Today’s announcement furthers these innovations by adding software-defined storage capabilities to address the need for intelligence-driven management of data.
Some customers prefer to buy a purpose-built cloud storage platform to create a low-cost storage layer in their private cloud/Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environments. To accommodate that need, Veritas is announcing the Veritas Access Appliance. This appliance allows enterprises to easily replace outdated or sub-optimal storage, including tape storage, with a simple, long-term, cost-effective integrated offering that combines the Veritas Access software with pre-tested and configured hardware in an easy to consume form factor. It includes the following features and benefits:
- Highly scalable software-defined storage: Just as with the Veritas Cloud Storage offering, customers can use the appliance to easily scale up and scale out storage capacity as their organisation grows. Integration with Veritas NetBackup provides consistent end-to-end long-term data retention and protection, complete with classification and global deduplication features.
- Multi-cloud capabilities: The appliance enables enterprises to embrace cloud adoption with the ability to build their own private cloud or provision cloud storage platforms as a low-cost storage tier to meet performance requirements, across a range of leading cloud service providers.
- Cost-effective data retention: Customers can replace and consolidate cumbersome and costly tape storage with this agile, scalable and integrated appliance that can also help to meet demanding recovery time objectives.
- Exceptional archiving integration: The Veritas Access Appliance also works as a primary archive store for Veritas Enterprise Vault, offering a compliant and flexible storage alternative for archiving retention.
“What makes Veritas unique is their ability to bring a new level of intelligence to storing and managing large quantities of data,” said Amita Potnis, Research Manager, IDC. “Using such intelligence is critical to effectively extracting value from the ever-growing volume of data in a cost-effective manner. An appliance form factor option for Veritas Access will also address the needs of customers who prefer simplicity in procurement, deployment and support.”
