Tuesday, February 07, 2017

Enterprise storage gateway for SMB with Morro Data

Morro Data (www.morrodata.com), alternative player in storage gateway, recently unveiled its solution which finally offers a cloud storage gateway for SMB. Hum, let me dig a bit as I don't consider this really a new thing even for SMB.
The company was founded by Paul Tien who came with his team from Netgear where they developed and managed ReadyNAS, a very good NAS for SMB with plenty of enterprise features.
Morro Data has developed a cloud storage gateway represented by a small edge device with files stored on Amazon S3. Users access data only with CIFS/SMB and no NFS, good point NFS is absent of that market segment. Devices named Morro CacheDrive, available in 2 flavors (CacheDrive itself and xCache Expansion), are logically linked together to establish a global file system, developed by Morro, with hot data across all participating entities. Storage devices come in 2 flavors: model G40 with HDD or model G80 SSD. Four main features are delivered: Encryption with AES-256 and data are transported via SSL, Compression and Deduplication and Versioning plus finally managed centrally. For SMB, the file size limit is 96MB, pretty good. Morro CacheDrive - minimum at $499 for 1TB - must be coupled with Morro Cloud service which is a monthly subscription based on the number of gateway considered. For instance for 2 gateways, the annual fee is $49 x 12 x 2 = $1176 + a Morro CacheDrive for a total of $1675. Beyond 12 sites, Morro doesn't describe if it works and invite prospects to call them.


It remembers me several products, for instance for SMB, one approach, dead now, was CacheNGo (I wrote in French a post about them in Sept 2009), or CTera who is clearly the leader in that space especially for ROBO and SMB. And of course plenty of enterprise flavors with Nasuni, Panzura, BridgeStor or even WAN Accelerator/Optimizer such Riverbed and even I'm sure you remember that approach WAFS. Morro Data is a pretty good idea, the main difference is that finally you buy everything from Morro, the device and the service, even if data are stored on Amazon S3.
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