Master the Hybrid Multi-Cloud and Unlock the Value of Your Data

Thanks to a new Wasabi-Scality partnership, the Zenko ecosystem and user community can now integrate ultra-low-cost, high-speed Wasabi hot cloud storage into their multi-cloud and hybrid cloud applications and workflows.

If you’re wondering what the difference is between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, you’re not alone. There’s a lot of hype and confusion out there. The terms are often used interchangeably, but they are, in fact, two different but related things. In this post, I’ll do my best to explain the difference, why they’re important, and what Zenko and the Scality-Wasabi solution bring to the table.

What’s the difference between multi-cloud and hybrid cloud?

A multi-cloud strategy is pretty much what it sounds like: the use of more than one cloud provider (usually two or more public clouds, but it could also refer to private and public clouds). Because different departments, use cases and applications may have different requirements, a multi-cloud strategy ensures ultimate agility and flexibility for selecting the right cloud for the right job. Using multiple public cloud providers also protects companies from vendor lock-in and provides resiliency should one cloud fail.

However, multi-cloud strategy alone has its limitations. While most large enterprises are embracing the public cloud for the agility and economies of scale it offers, they still have plenty of workloads running in on-premises or hosted data centers and private clouds. Hybrid cloud solutions take this fact into consideration. You can think of a hybrid storage solution as a multi-cloud that provides orchestration, communication, and data exchange between public clouds and on-premises storage.

Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud storage use cases

Multi-cloud enables you to build best-in-class solutions by mixing and matching your favorite services from multiple providers. One cloud provider may have high-performance computing, but their storage is slow or too expensive. Perhaps you want to create a low-cost active video archive using Wasabi hot cloud storage, but leverage content delivery capabilities from Amazon, for example.

There are many use cases for hybrid cloud storage and the need is growing across a wide variety of industries. In media and entertainment, content creation and production often take place in on-premises private clouds. However, these same companies may use a variety of public cloud services for transcoding, distributing content (CDN), or archiving raw files. Security-conscious financial firms may require the control and performance of on-premises storage, but public cloud storage offers compelling off-site compliance for long-term archives. And many industries have a need for cloud analytics, such as AWS Elastic Map Reduce (EMR), for data stored on-premises.

Hybrid cloud storage challenges

Until recently, true hybrid cloud storage has been out of reach due to different proprietary formats across public clouds and gateway products. There are solutions that enable movement and tiering of data from on-premises storage to public clouds, but they can’t leverage the full power of the cloud because the data is not accessible in the native cloud format.

Further, each public cloud provider speaks a different language with their APIs and handles security and authentication differently. Just as developers don’t want to rewrite their applications to work with every different cloud, IT operations don’t want to give up visibility and oversight. They want to offer agility and flexibility of choice, but not at the expense of security and centralized control.

True hybrid cloud storage requires:

• Multi-cloud support for leading and next-generation public cloud storage services
• Tight integration with scalable on-premises object storage
• Federated security management to eliminate the complexity and variations in cloud security models
• The ability to store data in native cloud format for open access by cloud apps and services
• Simple policy-based data management for on-premises to and from public clouds

The Scality Zenko Solution

Scality’s multi-cloud controller technology is the key to unlocking the power of hybrid clouds. It enables total data transparency and control with federated multi-cloud security and identity management with a single point of authentication for on-premises and public clouds. Other advanced multi-cloud features include policy-based lifecycle management, replication, location control, and federated search.

Zenko standardized and unified interfaces across clouds to streamline integration and eliminate vendor lock-in. It enables native cloud access through the S3 object interface or through legacy file protocols (NFS, SMB) which are namespace and data-compatible with S3 data. This unlocks the true value of data by enabling full compatibility across on-premises applications, cloud applications and cloud services from AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and now Wasabi hot cloud storage.

Wasabi is also integrated with Zenko Orbit, Scality’s cloud-based data management portal for simplified storage operations. Check out this short video to see how simple it is for a developer or IT generalist to create replication workflows, search across a single, global namespace, or monitor the health of their entire hybrid storage infrastructure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUKw7IhrSNo

Why we like this partnership

Wasabi and Scality both believe that everyone should be in control of their own data. Scality's vision for Zenko is to bring control and freedom to the developer to unleash a new generation of multi-cloud applications. Wasabi believes that cloud storage should be an inexpensive, fast, and simple utility with no complex tiers, egress fees, or additional charges for API calls. It’s your data. That’s why Wasabi doesn’t charge you to access it.

Wasabi extends the use cases for Zenko to applications that require fast and ultra-low-cost cloud storage services, such as nearline archival storage for post-production video workflows. Through our partnership, thousands of cloud storage users who haven’t heard of Wasabi will be exposed to our groundbreaking price-performance value proposition (80% cheaper and 6x faster than Amazon S3).

What’s not to like about that.