When an organization decides to begin its cloud journey, one of the biggest challenges is trying to find a cloud provider that is the right fit. Typically, the IT planner has to choose from the mega-cloud providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Cloud or the hundreds of small regional providers. In many cases, the organization may feel lost in the sea of services that mega-cloud providers offer and underwhelmed by the regional provider’s offerings.
The smaller regional provider often delivers excellent service and support and is very accessible to their customers. The regional providers also tend to offer use platforms similar to the on-premises data center like VMware, for seamless migration to the cloud or disaster recovery. They lack, however, the global presence and the scale of the mega-cloud providers, which is needed to deliver capabilities like disaster recovery, cloud bursting, and native execution. There is an opportunity for an in-between, “just-right” provider that can deliver white-glove service and support while at the same time providing a global footprint.
Introducing iland
iland is a full-service cloud provider that focuses on Cloud Backup, Office 365 Backup, Disaster Recovery as a Service, Cloud Object Storage, and Cloud Infrastructure for hosting applications. iland, in business for 25 years, has 11 years of experience delivering cloud and disaster recovery. They have nine data centers, and all are ISO 27001 and SSAE16 certified. Another data center is set to come online this year. Inside those data centers, they use proven technology like VMware, HPE Nimble, and Cisco.
iland’s Secure Cloud Platform is VMware-based for a familiar customer experience. Customers can run their VMware based virtual machines in the iland cloud with no changes and no transformation, making it an ideal location for disaster recovery, cloud bursting, or cloud hosting applications.
Because the infrastructure is VMware based, the customer can move these workloads into the iland cloud unchanged. To further facilitate moving applications to their cloud, iland provides a solution, called Catalyst, which answers the “is the cloud the right solution for my use case?” question. Catalyst enables customers to quickly model and size cloud requirements for individual workloads, applications groups, or entire production sites. The solution also provides network analysis, so data transfer times are understood. iland customers can continue to use the software to model monthly usage costs for internal due diligence.
From a data protection perspective, iland is a key partner of both Veeam and Zerto. iland can create a turnkey cloud backup or HA strategy based on these products, or existing customers of the solutions can use iland as an ideal target. For example, Veeam customers can leverage the new Cloud Tier feature to archive older backups to iland’s Cloud Object Storage. Those customers can also take advantage of iland’s VMware infrastructure to create Veeam DRaaS functionality.
iland is also an ideal way to backup data from other cloud providers. iland can receive data from both Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. While many vendors provide cloud backup, most of their solutions store the protected copy on the same cloud. iland provides an alternate storage location to protect cloud-hosted workloads or Office 365 data. iland has dedicated access to these providers at speeds up to 10Gbps.
StorageSwiss Take
The completeness of the iland offering enables the customers to take a crawl, walk, run approach to the cloud. They can start just by using iland to store a second copy of backups or to tier older backups. They can also use it as a destination for their Office 365 backups. They can then leverage iland’s native VMware functionality to create DRaaS functionality. Finally, they can move specific workloads to the cloud either when peak loads occur or when the customer wants to move workloads to the cloud permanently. iland may have solved the cloud Goldilocks problem by delivering a higher level of white-glove service but at the scale that organizations need.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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