Upstart NooBaa Simplifies Hybrid Cloud Content Management
Curtis Chan,
Senior Editor,
Broadcast Beat Magazine
NooBaa, Inc., an emerging player in the area of Software Defined Storage (SDS), has delivered a new architecture that promises to deliver unprecedented flexibility for customers dealing with large-scale datasets and media content.
NooBaa’s software solution, which launched at VmWorld earlier this summer, can pool together host-based capacity with external public cloud capacity to create a scalable and continuous fabric of storage, where data I/O is exposed to customers through the increasingly popular Amazon S3 API.
NooBaa has plenty of company in targeting unstructured data and retention-oriented workloads such as Splunk and media archival, including scale-out NAS (Isilon, Qumulo) as well as object storage (Cleversafe/IBM, CEPH, Caringo). But NooBaa is the first to promise not only complete hardware independence, but the ability to support unlimited heterogeneity, and the ability to manage data placement across multiple public clouds.
NooBaa’s secret sauce is an advanced control-plane design that dynamically monitors resources and adapts data placement to optimize for performance, economics, reliability, and other factors. A system of with this much platform and cloud flexibility could present an entirely new customer experience to the IT managers dealing with large content collections.
According to Yuval Dimnik, NooBaa’s CEO, “We see the chance to really make an impact in media production and archival as well as capacity intensive IT workloads like logging and analytics. The ability to quickly bootstrap capacity using existing resources, but scale into
Petabytes using any media, server, or networking technology just removes so much risk from infrastructure decisions. We elimin-ate the upfront complexity of deploy-
ment, we eliminate lock-in, and in the end, that means cost-savings.”
As IT organizations grapple with the challenges of cloud adoption, one of the especially difficult issues with large-scale data is managing data migration: It’s relatively easy to migrate an application into a public cloud host, but it can be expensive and time consuming to get the associated data-set there. For applications, such as rendering where cloud-bursting is a common use-case, this data-gravity is a real impediment to flexibility. NooBaa helps solve this problem by letting customers arbitrarily pool cloud hosts and cloud storage services into a cluster, including Amazon’s S3 and Microsoft’s Azure Blob Storage services.
“We’re talking to multiple media & entertainment
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