RackForce, Coraid Partner to Expand Cloud Business

RackForce, a Canadian enterprise cloud services provider, and scale-out Ethernet storage solutions provider Coraid have partnered to build out their cloud businesses, which includes the scaling up of cloud storage to 2 PTB.

The real gist of the news, though, is in solving a problem enterprises are finding when turning to cloud. According to RackForce and Coraid, building an enterprise cloud offering faces a major challenge in multi-tenancy that is required to manage multiple workloads with varying performance and capacity requirements. But through its partnership with Coraid, RackForce claims it has saved more than $1 million in capex and opex costs.

"With legacy storage vendors what we constantly ran into is what I refer to as 'marketecture,'” said Tim Dufour, co-founder and CEO of RackForce, in a prepared statement. "A sales guy would come in and quote us performance and capacity numbers based on an enterprise environment. Since we deal with hundreds of enterprises, we have a complexity much higher than you'd see in the typical enterprise. We constantly found that while the physical capacity was there, if we were to maximize it, performance would suffer significantly."

It's a good example of the differences between traditional on-premise IT needs and the requirements of the cloud era. There's a certain tradition to elements of IT, but some of the old ways of doing things aren't really cutting it in the cloud realm. And where one solution provided operational and cost efficiencies in a traditional environment (and probably still does), it doesn't necessarily translate to the needs of cloud services providers.

"Public cloud service providers have a very different set of challenges than traditional data centers and, therefore, have a very different set of requirements for their storage vendor," said Dave Kresse, CEO of Coraid, in a prepared statement. "These challenges include rapid and unpredictable growth of large data sets; the need to support mixed workloads and address performance, availability and resiliency on a per-workload basis; and the need for manageability and visibility capabilities that accelerate the CSP's business."