Storage Switzerland is attending Storage Networking World (SNW) again this fall and as in shows past we will be providing quick notes on our conversations throughout the show.

Cloud Storage is rapidly emerging as a new storage segment that from a hardware perspective are scalable, affordable and easy to manage. In many cases they are also object based storage systems that allows for extremely high file (objects) count. These systems are ideal for Managed Service Providers (MSP) and Online Application Providers (OAP) looking to provide their customers with an alternative to the larger public cloud storage offerings.

These solutions are not totally complete though and the MSP/OAP are faced with having to add features to these storage systems in order to be able to compete completely. They need capabilities like Identity Management, Multi-Tennacy, API driven automated provisioning, Thin provisioning, REST API programability, as well as track and expose "cloud" billing data. Mezeo's MezeoCloud Software brings all of these capabilities to the storage system that the MSP/OAP wants to use.

While several cloud storage solutions have some of these capabilities most do not have all of them but the MSP/OAP needs all of them. Without MezeoCloud they are left to develop them on their own. A MSP typically will not have the capability to develop these features on their own and a OAP would rather spend their precious development resources elsewhere.

In addition to bringing these capabilities to object based storage systems Mezeo Software brings capabilities to more traditional legacy based storage systems that allow them to also be used by MSPs/OAPs. In addition to the above cloud features Mezeo brings the ability to virtualize backend storage systems so that cloud like scale can be achieved. Data can be seamlessly moved between storage platforms as needed.

Mezeo's MezeoCloud software solution should be something that MSP/OAPs consider as they build out their cloud storage offering. Storage OEMs should also be talking to Mezeo to either complete their cloud storage solution set or allow their legacy storage systems to solve cloud storage problems.