CloudLeverage Eyes Enterprise Cloud Storage

Some cloud storage providers compete on features, others on price. Startup CloudLeverage says it will compete on both fronts, claiming it offers enterprise-grade features at public cloud pricing. At $0.05 per gigabyte of storage, the pricing announced by CloudLeverage undercuts Amazon's $0.15 per GB pricing and yet offers customers such enterprise features as network-attached storage, VPN tunneling, or an MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) infrastructure.

CloudLeverage, funded by hosting and colocation provider Netriplex, says it will provide storage, acceleration, security, load balancing, and DNS services from 32 data centers worldwide. Storage customers can choose to place their data in up to nine data centers.

"We offer a few hundred petabytes of data capacity now and in the next couple of months that will expand to exabytes of storage that is all NAS-based," said CloudLeverage President and CTO Jonathan Hoppe.

Files can be uploaded directly from mobile clients and shared across multiple users, with the file owner retaining the ability to manage access. Data is secured using 256 bit SSL in transit and AES encryption at rest.

Touts Geographic Diversity
The company says its diverse geographic presence is important to enterprise customers that want the peace of mind of having data dispersed to avoid downtime or loss of data through a natural disaster affecting a single location, according to Hoppe. Security is offered at "two or three levels" beyond existing public clouds as customers can choose to add a VPN tunnel to the cloud, or specify an MPLS network, Hoppe adds.

The company claims its support of the Network Files Transer and Common Internet File System access protocols is unique for enterprise cloud customers.

CloudLeverage will offer its SaaS-provider customers "cloud acceleration" services through its use of WAN acceleration technologies between data centers, says Hoppe. "We take content delivery networking one level further because we'll optimize traffic between data centers. We'll send less data over the pipe and people won't have to cache the content at the edge. We've created a mesh between the data centers and the content will run over a private MPLS." Hoppe says the effort will shave 30% off the content delivery time.

To avoid distributed denial of service attacks, Hoppe says the company has placed cloud firewalls at each of its data centers. "We'll block malicious traffic as far away as possible," said Hoppe, who says CloudLeverage is suitable for customers that are heavily into technology, or where acceleration is key.