Sanbolic, Zadara Develop Joint Storage, Clustering Solution

Amazon Web Services (AWS) (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Rackspace Hosting (NYSE: RAX) users soon will have access to an enterprise-class cloud storage solution with high availability application clustering that ties into Sanbolic‘s Melio data management software and Zadara Storage‘s Virtual Private Storage Array (VPSA).

Sanbolic and Zadara have teamed up to develop a storage solution that will leverage both of their technologies on leading public cloud providers, AWS and Rackspace. According to the two companies, the new solution is intended to increase availability, scalability, performance, protection and management efficiency of business-critical applications and data, but the real key to the solution is it provides the ability to do application clustering in the public cloud.

“The advantages of being able to span business critical applications from on-premise data centers to a public cloud are impossible to ignore, starting with huge efficiency increases and significant cost decreases -– to dramatic enhancements in scalability, availability, performance and disaster recoverability/data protection,” said Momchil “Memo” Michailov, Sanbolic’s CEO and co-founder.

Michailov said the joint cloud-based storage solution from Sanbolic and Zadara will make it easier for customers to “plug into” such benefits and rededicate IT resources to activities more directly affecting the bottom line.

Zadara CEO and co-founder Nelson Nahum noted in a prepared statement that the combination of Zadara’s VSPA service with Sanbolic’s data management software enables customers to move business-critical into the public cloud more confidently. Some customers are bound to be skeptical and wary of moving the applications they rely on to run their businesses into the public cloud even as other businesses have already begun or completed their own migrations.

The joint announcement follows closely on the heels of Sanbolic tweaking its technology to work on public clouds and the integration of Sanbolic Melio with Microsoft System Center 2012.

As a 100 percent channel-committed vendor, Sanbolic’s goal has been to work exclusively with the channel, but be somewhat choosy about the partners it works with. Plenty of vendors take the approach of doing business with a limited number of partners to keep its value as high as possible and be more hands-on with the partners it does have, and Sanbolic follows that strategy.

Try to find the words “channel” or “partner” on the Zadara website, though, and it becomes clear the company doesn’t share the same channel focus, although its channel sales are not exactly unknown to its management team.

What exactly this will mean for Sanbolic channel partners is unknown at this point.