The News: Catalogic CloudCasa partnering with Ondat, introducing pre-tested bundles of its CloudCasa backup-as-a-service solution for Kubernetes environments with Ondat container-native storage was announced a few weeks ago. See the full press release from CloudCasa here.
Analyst Take: Catalogic’s CloudCasa partnership with Ondat is all about accelerating the adoption of Kubernetes data protection. As Kubernetes environments are steadily moving into production, running a growing number of enterprises’ key applications and workloads, the ability to lower recovery point objectives (RPOs) to close to zero is growing increasingly important in order to minimize business downtime. This requires replication based on storage snapshots, which means that the backup software requires control over storage and it needs to be in the data path.
That’s why this partnership between Catalogic CloucCasa and Ondat is a timely one. The partnership doesn’t include any product integration, it’s a matter of the two vendors promising their products work well together. The CloudCasa software will provide capabilities for data backup, operational recovery and mobility, while Ondat will provide the storage snapshotting and replication. Outside of the alliance with Ondat, CloudCasa is pursuing other cloud-native storage partners, such as DataCore, and Ondat has stated its data protection strategy is to work with backup products rather than to do its own.
A Partner-Driven Approach is Becoming Increasingly Common — and Provides Myriad Benefits
Today, smart, strategic partnerships are the name of the game — and this partnership is a reflection of that thinking. Working together can help CloudCasa and Ondat in competitive deals with Pure Storage’s Portworx, which has both cloud native lstorage (PX-Enterprise) and data protection (PX-Backup) in its portfolio. At the same time, the partner-driven approach avoids vendor lock-in, providing customers with flexibility to choose their container-native and backup software for their independent merits.
The market for Kubernetes data protection is still maturing, which makes it tough for pure-play Kubernetes data protection products such as Catalogic’s CloudCasa to gain traction. Greater awareness of the utility of third-party data protection solutions in use cases like recovering from ransomware and enabling developers to roll an application back to a specific period of time still needs to be built. Additionally, Catalogic faces the difficult task of bridging IT Operations teams responsible for overseeing and enforcing data protection solutions and practices, with the DevOps teams that are driving the adoption of Kubernetes in the enterprise.
The Catalogic CloudCasa and Ondat partnership helps to address this barrier to adoption with a SaaS delivery model, which makes it easy-to-consume, by IT Operations and DevOps teams alike. This element of simplicity has the additional benefit of addressing the staffing shortages that are a leading headache facing IT Operations teams. Meanwhile, the consumption-based pricing helps to avoid over-purchasing.
Disclosure: Evaluator Group, wholly owned by The Futurum Group, is a research and analyst firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article. Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually.
