ClearSky Data Inks Deal with Faction for VMware DR

ClearSky Data, one of many young storage startups vying for a share of the hot storage market, today announced a partnership with Faction, a multi-cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider. Together, the companies will deliver disaster recovery (DR) on demand with VMware, allowing customers to eliminate the need for a secondary data center.

The partnership with Faction allows ClearSky, a provider of on-demand primary storage with built-in offsite backup and DR, to answer the compute question, “What do I do with my VMware?”

ClearSky Data’s Laz Vekiarides

“Faction has an on-demand cloud, so a customer can spin up VMware instances and pay for them on-demand similar to the way they spin up storage resources in our world,” said Laz Vekiarides, co-founder and chief technology officer at ClearSky Data.

The cloud storage market is expected to reach nearly $92.5 billion by 2022, up from $25.2 billion in 2017, according to the Research and Markets.

Enterprise organizations have struggled with the inability to access on-demand DR via the public cloud that delivers predictable performance, native VMware integrations and cost savings. ClearSky Data and Faction eliminate those concerns, with DR that delivers a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero and recovery time objective (RTO) of less than a minute. At the same time, users can cut their storage costs by more than 25 percent as they extend their enterprises to the cloud, according to the vendor.

“Customers want to get out of their secondary data centers to capture the flexibility and economics of the cloud, but it’s been almost impossible for them to get there with reliable performance and costs,” said Vekiarides.

For customers being sold directly by ClearSky Data, they’ll have the option of getting rid of their secondary data center altogether.

“They can simply have an on-demand virtual data center built by Faction, and then we can deliver the data to that virtual data center on demand in case of a disaster, or if they want to do things like test [development] or for expansion capacity because they have some sort of compute needs,” he added. “It completes our story.”

ClearSky Data launched its Partner Acceleration program less than a year ago, and today has about a dozen partners, including technology partners, MSPs and resellers. The company is actively signing up more in the metropolitan areas where it has points of presence. Today, that’s Boston; Ashburn, Virginia; New York, Chicago and Dallas.

Expansion plans are in the works, with about 10-15 cities targeted over the next year.

“We want to have a channel presence in all of those areas with partners who understand the local markets and vertical markets,” Vekiarides said.