Stratoscale ramps up its challenge to VMware and AWS

There's no question that #Amazon Web Services has set the standard for enterprise cloud services and that other public cloud providers are taking note. The startup Stratoscale, meanwhile, says it's gaining traction with customers who want the simplicity of #AWS without having to rely on the public cloud.

"What we're seeing today is people are trying to move away from the outdated #VMware infrastructure," said CEO Ariel Maislos. "They love what they're seeing in AWS -- they want to have more of that, but in their own environment, on their own terms."

Stratoscale has offered that solution since December with Symphony, a hardware-agnostic, hyperconverged software layer designed to manage a collection of x86 servers together as a single cloud infrastructure. Now, with a couple dozen customers under its belt -- coming from both legacy systems and the public cloud -- and $70m in fundingfrom backers like #Cisco and #Qualcomm, the three-year-old firm is rolling out an updated version of Symphony.

"In order to set up a cloud infrastructure, it used to be a huge project," Maislos said. "What we've managed to do in Symphony is transform it into a simple experience."

The updated version has new capabilities to support significant investments already made in storage infrastructure. It supports storage arrays from #EMC, #NetApp, #IBM, #Nimble, #Pure Storage, #Infinidat, #Oracle, #HDS, and #Dell. #Stratoscale has also added built-in data protection, ensuring the cloud infrastructure, applications, and data are always available.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/stratoscale-ramps-up-its-challenge-to-vmware-and-aws/