If you’re a hosting company looking for an inexpensive cloud storage solution, Parallels just might have a solution for you.
At the Parallels Summit 2013 in Las Vegas this week, the cloud technology vendor announced the launch of Parallels Cloud Storage, a virtualized storage solution for service providers.
Said Parallels CEO Birger Steen at the Summit media briefing: “It looks and talks like a SAN, but is disk storage.”
The solution pools together unused disk space on server nodes to create an inexpensive distributed, high-availabilty storage solution.
According to Birger, since they already have a highly sought-after server virtualization solution (Parallels Virtuzzo Containers ) used by lots of service providers, it was a logical step to extend the virtualization into the storage space to better serve their customers’ needs.
The main benefit would of course be cost, especially for small hosting companies.
Companies already using Parallels Virtuzzo Containers would benefit from having an inexpensive high-availabilty storage solution without having to buy a SAN, which can easily cost six figures for a datacentre deployment.
Parallels is bundling Virtuzzo Containers – their version of virtual machines – with Cloud Storage in one Cloud Server offering. Later in the roadmap for Cloud Storage is the ability to support other virtualization platforms like linux-based XEN and KVM.
Alex Larson, IS manager at iiNet, Australia’s third largest telecoms player, thinks that the Parallels Cloud Storage is a great idea.
However, the services architect feels that iiNet will need to evaluate the offering throughly, especially on data security and sovereignty issues.
“The biggest issue is data security and moving from a single tenant data store to a multi-tenant one,” he said.
Telcos like iiNet almost certainly have robust storage solutions, and would not be the best target audience who cares the most about cost.
According to Clement Teo, senior Asia Pacific analyst for research firm Forrester, the Parallels Cloud Storage service is best suited to small Joe Sixpack hosting companies who can’t afford SAN deployments.
“Smaller hosting companies that already use Parallels Virtuzzo Containers is an entry point for this product,” he said.
Layer on high availability for these hosting companies (who have clients with less stringent data needs) at a low entry cost, and you have a solution that is “a smart move by Parallels”, he said.
Parallels is not the only vendor who is going into the lucrative cloud storage space for SMBs. VMware made a play for the SMB space with a very similar vSphere Storage Appliance offering a few months back, and there are start-ups like Mezeo Software innovating in this arena.
Is Parallels signalling a bigger ambition by moving into storage and will this raise an alarm flag for storage vendors like EMC and NetApp ?
The cloud market is definitely not a settled space, with tons of start-ups and big boys who want a piece of it, and a growing Parallels is bound to trod on a few toes.
Privately-owned Parallels, for now, has a laser-focus on their SMB Platform-as-a-Service positioning. They are enabling hosting companies and service providers to duke it out in the SMB cloud space, but don’t compete in the space directly themselves.
Hence they don’t see themselves as competitors to cloud giants like Amazon and Google, whom Parallels CEO Birgen feels will do very well in the space, but won’t “eat everybody’s lunch” because SMBs are so diverse.
Based on Parallel’s own research, the SMB cloud market is expected to roughly double in size from 2012 (US$45 billion) to 2015 (estimated to be US$95 billion).
