Hosted Solutions Introduces Stratus Cloud Storage; Most Flexible, Cost-Effective Service Solution, Delivered Via The Web

RALEIGH, N.C., June 22. Hosted Solutions, the East Coast's premier provider of enterprise-class managed hosting solutions, today announced the immediate availability of its Stratus Cloud Storage product. The new offering enables companies of all sizes to manage and archive corporate-critical data, allowing them to do so at a fraction of the usual costs associated with building and maintaining a storage infrastructure. Stratus Cloud Storage includes the replication of data between Hosted Solutions' SAS-70 Type II data centers in North Carolina and Boston, as well as tools to facilitate access without programming.

Built on EMC's Atmos platform, designed to help service providers, ISVs and developers manage and optimize external clouds, Stratus Cloud Storage combines massive scalability and unparalleled flexibility with automated data placement, efficiently delivering content and information anywhere in the world through a standard interface. Stratus Cloud Storage now leverages CloudArray from TwinStrata, to provide easy access and increased performance for applications accessing data through a Stratus Cloud Storage implementation.

"Entrusting key data to companies that can effectively manage it has already become of vital importance to firms," said Jeff Kramer, Hosted Solutions' vice president of technology. "This is true of information that is needed immediately, as well as that which must be archived for various reasons. The full range of our services, including Stratus Cloud Storage, is designed to address this requirement, enabling our customers to increase efficiency, reduce complexity and save money." Kramer noted that Hosted Solutions' SAS-70 Type II data centers will handle the data, delivering the highest level of security and confidence.

The need for additional storage space, and ways to efficiently manage it, grows exponentially almost by the day. A new report from industry analyst IDC finds that by the year 2020, the so-called "digital universe" will grow by 44 times what it was last year, to 35 trillion gigabytes of information, including documents, audio and video files and more. Put another way, the IDC report says if that data was loaded onto a stack of DVDs, the stack would reach halfway to Mars, and finds that "a significant portion of the Digital Universe will be centrally hosted, managed, or stored in public or private repositories that today we call 'cloud services.'"

"As leaders in their fields, Hosted Solutions and TwinStrata understand the importance of implementing storage infrastructures that better map IT requirements to customer business objectives, optimize operational efficiency and enable substantial cost savings," said Nicos Vekiarides, TwinStrata's chief executive officer and co-founder. "We're proud that Hosted Solutions has adopted TwinStrata CloudArray SAN software as a key element in its cloud storage offering. CloudArray will deliver solid value to both Hosted Solutions and the companies that depend on it to host and manage their IT infrastructures," he added."With its focus on the needs of mid-tier enterprises and up, Hosted Solutions has positioned itself well through its cloud storage offering," said Deni Connor, principal analyst at Storage Strategies NOW. "By combining the proven capabilities of EMC's Atmos and TwinStrata with its own 'hi-touch' consultative approach, Hosted Solutions looks able to solve the customized challenges of its clients; a 'one-size-fits-all' cloud approach will not work for them. Stratus Cloud Storage's implementation will."

Available either as part of Hosted Solutions' Stratus Trusted Cloud platform, or a standalone service, Stratus Cloud Storage delivers a full range of benefits that Hosted Solutions' customers have come to rely on, including rapid implementation, elimination of upfront capital expenditures on hardware, and ongoing maintenance costs, and the ability to rapidly deploy additional storage on an as-needed basis. Stratus Cloud Storage is designed to help mid-sized companies easily implement cloud storage infrastructures that support key data protection functionalities such as replication, backup/restore, data archiving, disaster recovery, data & application mobility, data availability/security, and elastic capacity .

"We have tested CloudArray and Stratus Cloud Storage with Solution Specialists at Hosted Solutions with impressive results. This solution gives us the ability to store our backup data in the cloud without increasing our backup window, control our costs, and scale our system. With this solution, we are able to greatly reduce our local storage requirements," said Robb Bryn, vice president of operations at Cape Fear WebMasters, Inc. More information about Stratus Cloud Storage is available online.