‘Buursting’ Onto the Cloud Storage Scene

Cloud storage vendor SoftNAS announced today that it has changed its name to Buurst. The Seattle, Washington-based company also announced a radical change to its business plan: charging customers based on the performance of the data rather than the volume.

“Moving forward, Buurst will provide value by delivering data performance, without charging customers a second time for the volume of data they store in the cloud,” the company says in a press release. “Cloud service vendors have traditionally charged customers by the gigabyte, terabyte, or petabyte of data, however, with its new model, Buurst rejects this approach.”

Buurst (nee SoftNAS) is a cloud-based storage provider operating in the AWS and Azure clouds. The company claims that its virtual storage appliance is able to save customers up to two-thirds of the cost of storing data in AWS S3 or Azure Blob Store.

“Our customers’ data is growing exponentially and the current approach to data storage means their costs will soon eclipse their entire IT budget,” Buurst CEO Garry Olah says. “We service hundreds of enterprise customers who are turning to us to find a more cost-effective approach to data management in the cloud. We are making it easier and cheaper for our customers to bring all of their data to the cloud.”

Buurst’s virtual storage appliance lets customers continue to use their on-premise applications as they normally would, but leverage cloud-based data storage and backup instead of on-premise resources.

Buurst’s virtual NAS technology connects on-prem users to cloud-based storage

The key elements of Buurst’s network attach storage (NAS) filer technology include an “ObjectBacker” component that maps AWS S3- and Amazon Blob Store-compatible object storage into a pseudo block device, which is mounted as a ZFS file system and provides full POSIX support, as well as NAS features like deduplication, compression, storage snapshots, and auto-tiering, which are not offered as native services in the cloud storage offerings.

Also composing the virtual NAS is an acceleration technology called OjbFast that boosts I/O and throughput across dozens of back-end S3 or Blob Store buckets, as well as SmartTiers, which offers up to four levels of storage, which saves customers money while exposing SSD-like data access speeds, the company claims.

The company claims that its virtual storage appliance recently reached a performance milestone: 1 million IOPS per second. Now it’s banking on its customers signing up to move data at these speeds, alongside with a 99.999% guarantee that customers’ data will be available.

Buurst offers several levels of support, including an enterprise edition, a platinum edition, and an essentials edition. The company did not disclose specifically how it will price its offering going forward.

Buurst also announced that it has raised $5 million, bringing its total equity capital raised to $35 million to date. The company will be hosting a webinar tomorrow to discuss the changes.