Ninefold's 'click wrap' cloud storage goes live

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 28 June 2011 09:23

Business IT - Networking

Macquarie Telecom's 'click wrap' cloud service provider subsidiary, Ninefold, has announced that its cloud storage service - claimed to be the first of its kind in Australia - is now out of public beta and in full production.

The service, launched in Beta in March, is based on EMC Atmos storage technology. According to Ninefold, "the massively scalable storage service is fully tested, API accessible and ready to go as the first truly Australian-based equivalent to Amazon Web Services' S3 storage service."

Ninefold claims that: "With genuine 'swipe and go' credit card set up and self-managed service for under 10 cents per GB/month, Ninefold Cloud Storage is ideal for businesses of all sizes that want easy and flexible access to storage."

Ninefold says it received positive feedback from a range of customers with a wide variety of varying needs during the beta phase. These included Sydney-based cloud business, Saasu, which offers online accounting software to SMEs, and O2 Networks, an enterprise provider of networking and security consulting services for application delivery networks.

Saasu CTO, Paul Glavich, said: "Saasu has multiple geographic locations around the world where data is replicated for security and redundancy purposes. Using Ninefold Cloud Storage, we have been able to set up a local server, quickly and cheaply, with which we could also replicate data. This ensures Australian financial data is kept local, and also provides additional levels of redundancy and failover in conjunction with our existing primary provider."

He added: "In ten minutes it was easy to provision a host within Ninefold. One hour later, and the configuration for replication was complete and data was successfully being replicated to a locally hosted instance. The cost is extremely low, yet the benefits to Saasu and our customers are extensive."

Euan Prentice, managing director of 02 Networks, said: "As the only Riverbed Diamond Partner in Australia, O2 Networks are excited to leverage Ninefold's cloud storage platform to deliver a local, secure, high performance and cost effective replacement to tape backup. Riverbed's Whitewater Cloud Storage Gateway combined with Ninefold's cloud storage platform now allows 02 Networks to provide Australian businesses of all sizes with a 'pay as you grow' managed solution."

Ninefold was launched in January, shortly after Macquarie Telecom had launched its own IaaS offering, stressing its differentiation from the 'click-wrap' agreement, pay-by-credit card, self-service model of major overseas cloud providers, which Ninefold replicates but with Australian rather than overseas servers.