True Multi-Tenancy Now Available with CloudByte’s Offering

CloudByte is a Bangalore based startup that provides a software only solution that helps customers save significant cost through the next generation of storage virtualization that delivers high utilization, predictable storage performance with full isolation and security.

Quick pointers on CloudByte:

Year Founded: 2010

Offices: Bangalore & San Mateo

Team Size: 35

Founder & CEO: Srivibhavan Balaram, an alumnus of IIT Delhi & IIM Bangalore with over 15 years of industry experience

In News: Secured Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners & Kae Capital

Customers: 10+ trails are going on with some very big names in the industry

Immediate Plans: Expanding sales team in the US

We recently got in touch with Srivibhavan Balaram to take a deep dive into CloudByte’s technology offering. Edited Excerpts:

Who are your target customers? Enterprises or Cloud Service Providers?

Our customers are any enterprises or cloud service providers who want to effectively share storage. In other words, we are a storage virtualization solution of the next generation. If you look at traditional storage virtualization offered by the established storage vendors, the customer needs to trade-off between predictable performance and storage utilization. The higher the storage utilization the less predictable is the storage performance. Moreover, the noisy neighbour issue can completely cut-off access to the storage. Lastly, there is no isolation between the different users, so security is a major concern.

CloudByte delivers the next generation storage virtualization without compromises. You can have high utilization, guaranteed storage QoS and full user isolation. CloudByte does that by building multi-tenancy into the entire storage stack – grounds-up. CloudByte creates a concept of a tenant storage machine (TSM) that is the storage equivalent of a server Virtual Machine (VM). We have filed 9 patents in the storage QoS and multi-tenancy space.

CloudByte is a storage virtualization solution but we are also a complete storage solution. In addition we can consume and virtualize any other vendors block storage.

Our core value proposition to Cloud Service providers is that the ability to provide guaranteed storage QoS allows them to add new premium storage services with QoS guarantees. Due to our tenant awareness within the storage, CSPs can now fully delegate storage administration to tenants – a huge plus and again these can be charged for, as of now each tenant can manage their own backup schedule or monitor their usage.

For corporate enterprises the key value proposition we offer is guaranteed isolation and security of different departments/divisions, complete elimination of application time-outs and ability to have different storage management policies in a unified environment.

Typically, Cloud Management Software like System Center, vSphere, Eucalyptus, OpenStack and CloudStack come with virtualized and multi-tenant storage controllers. How are you different? How do you integrate with them? How do you complement these offerings?

Most of these solutions are at the server/ VM level. The issue with storage is that, unlike servers, storage is additive and persistent. Two transactions that look identical at the server level can look completely different in the storage due to past history. These two transactions will need different levels of resources in the storage controller. Hence, no storage controller external to the storage can ever solve the issues of storage virtualization – trade-off between predictable performance and utilization. Hence, CloudByte’s storage virtualization solution is unique and it solves the fundamental issue within the storage controller.

Our management interface exposes REST APIs. Hence we can integrate into a wide variety of platforms that do storage / cloud provisioning or management.

Currently, we are building the integration for VMWARE Vsphere, Hyper-V and Citrix XEN. We will also integrate with Cloudstack and openstack for management and provisioning.

In fact, CloudByte Tenant Storage Machines integrate well with any virtual server environment.

Do you integrate with 3rd Party Cloud Storage services offered by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others?

We are part of the storage infrastructure. So potentially we could work with all these players as our customers. We can be the underlying storage for all the above mentioned services.

How do you compare to Amazon S3 or Windows Azure Blob storage?

We can be the underlying storage for these solutions. So we can integrate below their object layer.

Is your licensing friendly enough for service providers to expose storage as a service?  

Yes, our licensing is extremely flexible. We have both perpetual and subscription licenses. We can also have agreements with service providers on a revenue sharing model – So they pay us only if they make money by selling storage services based on our storage.

Tell us a bit more about your API.

Our APIs are REST based and as I mentioned we are a layer below S3 so we can integrate with the S3 stack. Also, service providers can easily integrate open source object storage solutions on top of our stack. We have solution descriptions that provide detailed instructions on how to do this.

What are choices for securing the data managed through your offering?

Our storage solution guarantees security in two ways. Firstly, we guarantee full isolation of different users .Next our data encryption methodology ensures that no one needs to know the encryption key – neither the customer nor the CSP administrator.

Are you competing with Amazon Storage Gateway in anyway? 

We aspire to have Amazon as our customer because our technology solves very fundamental issues in storage without disrupting existing deployments. So there is no question of us competing with Amazon or any of the Cloud service providers. We actually make their life easier with our solution.

What is your ultimate vision for CloudByte?

We want to be the leader in Cloud Storage in 3 to 5 years time. Our ultimate vision is to be the platform of choice for deployment of scalable storage across public and private clouds.

For more details about CloudByte, visit their website: http://www.cloudbyte.com/