I recently wrote a report for GigaOm about multi-cloud data storage and data mobility in which I mentioned NooBaa as one of the vendors to watch. And I’m glad to see Red Hat acquiring them, since it looks like NooBaa’s technology fits perfectly in the RedHat product line up.
About NooBaa
Ceph and Gluster are great products but RedHat misses the mark completely when it comes to hybrid- and multi-cloud storage. With NooBaa and its feature set, it will be much easier to integrate Ceph with other on premises or cloud object stores.
Noobaa has moved quickly from being “just another object store”, with a few smart features, to a multi-cloud storage controller and can now help to create single domain views of data spread on multiple repositories managed through user-defined polices. This solution is quite powerful and efficient in my opinion.
It’s highly likely that soon NooBaa code will be open sourced too, and I’d really love to see it end up in the same foundation that now manages Ceph and take advantage of the same community.
RedHat and IBM
As you may already know, RedHat has been recently acquired by IBM. I don’t know if RH will remain independent (like it was for VMWare with EMC), but it is also true that there are several overlaps now – GPFS (spectrum scale) Vs Gluster and COS Vs Ceph are targeting similar use cases. I’m pretty curious to see how this will be managed in the field, as well as the competition between IBMers and RHers.
On the other hand, NooBaa can be of help also in this case thanks to its ability to hide the backend object stores behind its front-end and assist IBM and RedHat to build interesting projects that can leverage a large solution set that now includes on-premises as well as public cloud offering all integrated together.
NooBaa will be very useful for customers wanting to repatriate their data or migrate data from one cloud to another. It can be done pretty seamlessly from the user and application point of view, while optimizing data movements in the backend to save money.
Closing the circle
As you may have read in my GigaOm report, the number of object storage vendors moving to a multi-cloud approach is increasing fairly quickly. Some are in the early stage of this evolution with basic features that include automated tiering to the cloud, while others already offer features that abstract the front-end access layer, available on multiple clouds and on premises, from a back-end that manages several repositories concurrently. Noobaa is an example of the latter.
The next in multi-cloud storage is to offer advanced features that include metadata augmentation as well as advanced index-search capabilites aimed at providing subasets of data in specialized virtual views.
