Low-Cost Cloud Storage With Cloud Leverage
Company:
Headquarters: Asheville, N.C.
Technology Sector: Storage
Key Product: Cloud Leverage
Year Founded: 2010
Number of Channel Partners: Just getting started
Ideal Channel Partner: Managed Service Provider
Why You Should Care: With only four account executives, the company is motivated to work with channel partners looking for a low-cost, cloud-based storage solution.
The Lowdown: Cloud Leverage, an Asheville, N.C.-based start-up, wants to help channel partners leverage cloud storage for their customers with a very simple offering: 5 cents per GB, per data center per month.
The company was founded with funding by Netriplex, a provider of dedicated hosting and collocation services with 32 data centers in the U.S. and overseas.
While Cloud Leverage does some hosting of customers' storage using Netriplex, it is a separate company free to partner with managed service providers, data center services providers, and traditional resellers who can leverage any hosted storage infrastructure, whether they own it or use a third-party data center, said Jonathan Hoppe, president and CTO.
"A customer looking to grow their business doesn't need to grow their own data center," he said. "They can leverage our data centers to get a global presence."
Cloud Leverage provides a complete storage solution for which customers pay only for the amount of storage capacity used, and not for any bandwidth used to upload or download it, Hoppe said. The only other charge some customers might face is if they publish content through the company's content delivery network, he said.
The company works with legacy storage protocols such as CIFS and NFS, and also takes advantage of the REST (Representational State Transfer) protocol, which allows its services to work with such cloud providers as Amazon.
Cloud Leverage's business is heavily focused on Windows environments because of the large number of enterprises that have standardized on the operating system, but it supports almost every operating system except Solaris, Hoppe said.
Despite being funded by Netriplex, Cloud Leverage is a completely independent company, Hoppe said.
"Our team includes engineering, development and salespeople who are focused on Cloud Leverage," he said. "We don't send our people to Netriplex. We want to leverage partnerships. Netriplex is only helping Cloud Leverage to the point of providing funding and rack space."