Cloudian to Extend Tiering Capabilities to Amazon's S3 and Glacier

On the heels of a $24 million financing round, Cloudian announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services to expand the capabilities of its hybrid cloud storage platform by adding tiering for Amazon's cloud storage services S3 and Glacier. Enterprises can use the object storage platform to build scalable storage infrastructure that combines on-premise storage with cloud.

Bringing the two AWS services into the fold helps users leverage agility benefits of public cloud but keep the most sensitive data in their own data centers. Cloudian challenges traditional storage approaches like SAN and NAS and has positioned itself well to benefit from enterprise demand for hybrid cloud solutions.

The company's has attracted customers like Bitcasa, Storage Made Easy, NTT, Nextel and Vodaphone and high-profile partnerships with the likes of Citrix, Apache CloudStack and OpenStack.

Bitcasa is a popular mobile file sharing application on AWS that is expanding its enterprise offerings. "Cloudian's partnership with Amazon helps us deliver a more full-featured and secure hybrid file sharing with all the necessary control for critical business content," said Joe Lyons, vice president of business development at Bitcasa.

Storage Made Easy has an enterprise file share and sync solution and tackles sprawl.

"This partnership with Amazon Web Services means that our customers can now not only deploy full-featured, on-premises, Amazon S3-compliant clouds, but easily auto-tier their data to the AWS cloud," said Paul Turner, chief marketing officer at Cloudian. "Users have the option to leverage AWS infrastructure for long-term bulk storage while keeping their most critical data close at hand.

"This unique hybrid cloud approach ensures nearly unlimited capacity expansion, straightforward data tiering and unfettered use of the vast ecosystem of AWS S3 applications – all behind the user's firewall."

Expanding geographic reach

Cloudian recently closed a $24 million financing round with new investors, INCJ and Fidelity Growth Partners, and existing Cloudian shareholders, including Intel Capital. The company said it will extend its global sales and marketing reach through targeted programs with the funds, as well as amplify market development.

“This substantial investment is strong validation of our unique and leading approach to enterprise on-premises storage and hybrid cloud storage," said Michael Tso, CEO and co-founder of Cloudian. "The rapid growth of unstructured data is transforming the data storage landscape. With this funding, we will accelerate the deployment of our production-proven storage solutions and revolutionize the cost, scalability and availability models for storing unstructured data in the enterprise."