Yottabyte unveiled an enhanced version of its software for virtualizing commodity server, storage and networking hardware into a virtualized data center designed to help smaller companies build cloud data centers.

Yottabyte Enterprise 2.0 software can be used by small, midsize and even large enterprise companies to build a scalable public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure with all the required critical network functionality in a single package, said Duane Tursi, vice president of sales and marketing for the Bloomfield Township, Mich.-based software developer.

"When we look at the world's largest, most scalable clouds, they're from the public cloud providers like Amazon and Google," Tursi said. "But the channel can't really take advantage of that kind of infrastructure. Those companies use PhD-type people to build software that can use commodity hardware. So channel partners turn to the OEMs, but they've built their business with disparate technology."

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Yottabyte saw a gap between the large public cloud providers and those OEMs such as EMC, NetApp, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM that provide converged infrastructure platforms for building cloud infrastructures and filled it with software that allows smaller companies to build their own infrastructures with the security and performance businesses require, Tursi said.

"Our virtual data center software allows the virtualization of server, storage and networking resources to allow data and operations to move seamlessly in the data center and between data centers, regardless of the underlying hardware assets," he said.

Yottabyte Enterprise 2.0 starts with the company's Yottabyte File System to virtualize the server, storage and networking resources into an infrastructure abstraction layer, Tursi said. Those resources can be provided to a business' users as a public, private or hybrid cloud on a subscription basis, he said.

"We show people that, without having to use expensive controllers and ASICs, they can provide a cloud using commodity equipment," he said.

Included in the software are such storage capabilities as thin provisioning, caching, scheduling, distributed file system (DFS), content delivery networking (CDN), deduplication, snapshots, replication, synchronization and search, he said.

Because Yottabyte Enterprise 2.0 is a software application, customers and their channel partners can use whatever hardware resources they need, Tursi said. For instance, they can order hardware optimized for either performance or scale.

"Applications really want to live in the software, not the hardware," he said. "The goal is to decouple the application from the physical hardware."

NEXT: Building Flexible, Scalable Clouds From Commodity Hardware

Yottabyte's Tursi said the company's software, in combination with commodity hardware, can replace storage arrays and software, servers, virtualization and encryption technologies from all the major vendors. The company's road map also includes adding such capabilities as search, disaster recovery and write once, read many (WORM) in the near future, he said.

He also said Yottabyte Enterprise 2.0 is a more simple way to address cloud infrastructure than that promised by such vendors as SimpliVity and Scale Computing, which combine server, storage and networking resources in their own purpose-built hybrid appliances.

"With hybrid appliances, there will be some loss in performance or scalability somewhere," he said. "With us, customers can use the same infrastructure they currently use and add more memory or processors or disks or SSDs. Our software handles it all behind the scenes."

The software is intelligent enough that it knows that data to be archived should be stored on slower-spinning drives that use less energy, while leveraging server memory, SSDs or disk as needed for performance, Tursi said.

The software is currently sold to customers through solution providers. However, Tursi said, the company might make the software available through a couple of hardware vendors looking to bundle it with their hardware.

There are two pricing models.

For public cloud implementations, the software is available for 15 cents per deduplicated GB of data per month. "So if the customer has 10 TB of data in a cloud, but after deduplication it measures only 6 TB, they pay for only 6 TB," Tursi said.

For private cloud implementations, customers pay under $9,000 per physical host for a three-year subscription regardless of capacity. A one-year subscription is also available.

There is also a free edition for customers to test that is limited to a single host server regardless of the customer's capacity, he said.

PUBLISHED Nov. 1, 2012