Cloudian is to release a fully native S3-compatible object storage solution for VMware Cloud Providers that is managed directly from VMware vCloud Director, a component of the VMware Cloud Provider Platform.

The Cloudian solution gives VMware Cloud Providers a scalable storage foundation for delivering value-add services to customers.

These services will enable customers to achieve their capacity-intensive data protection, management and analytics objectives by leveraging the rapidly growing ecosystem of S3-compatible applications.

Within the public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) market, IDC forecasts that cloud storage services revenues will reach $20 billion in 2019 and more than double to $44 billion by 2022.

At the same time, the S3 API has emerged as the de facto standard for cloud storage and the common language for integrating on-premises and cloud storage in an increasing hybrid cloud-dominant world.

Independent cloud providers are well-positioned to capitalise on these market opportunities because of their specialisation, multi-source flexibility and geographic diversity.

In addition to fully native S3 API compatibility, Cloudian offers the ability to start small and grow without interruption to an exabyte of storage.

Other key Cloudian features include: multi-tenant resource pooling, integrated management tools such as billing and quality of service controls, data encryption and Write Once, Read Many (WORM) for security and compliance, and geo-distribution for easily managing storage across multiple data centers.

“With VMware-powered clouds serving nearly 150,000 enterprise customers through its network of more than 4,000 cloud providers, VMware cloud infrastructure is driving the 4th ‘megacloud,'” says Cloudian CEO Michael Tso.

“Through the solution announced today, Cloudian and VMware will help meet the evolving storage needs of these providers and customers. I would also note the significance of this announcement in reinforcing the S3 API as the de facto standard of public and private cloud storage, Cloudian's leadership in S3-compatible object storage and the many benefits our technology provides, including limitless scalability, multi-tenancy, geo-distribution, and flexible data security and lifecycle management tools.

With Cloudian Object Storage for vCloud Director, VMware Cloud Providers can draw on these benefits and Cloudian's technology solutions partnerships to deliver an enhanced range of high value-add services, including:

• Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS).
• Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS).
• Archive-as-a-Service (AaaS).
• Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).
• Big Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS).
• Containers-as-a-Service (CaaS).
• Software development.

VMware Cloud Providers can deploy Cloudian as a storage appliance or as software-defined storage anywhere in the world.

In either case, vCloud Director manages the storage, all from a single location if desired, and provides native automation of workflows.

“VMware Cloud Providers are trusted advisors for customers in their cloud journey, and VMware vCloud Director offers an open, extensible architecture that enables VMware to provide the ubiquitous digital foundation in support of our customers' and partners' digital transformation,” says VMware cloud provider software business unit and product management vice president Rajeev Bhardwaj.

“Cloudian Object Storage for vCloud Director will further enable our partners to capture the opportunity for managed services and extend their relationship with their enterprise customers beyond providing only basic cloud infrastructure-as-a-service.

Cloudian Object Storage for vCloud Director is expected to be available in July 2019.