Fancy an AWS region in your own data centre? Stratoscale can do it

Israeli outfit Stratoscale has updated its Symphony suite so it can effectively become an on-premises Amazon Web Services (AWS) region.

Symphony is a software overlay that does the “turn your pile of x86 into a cloud” thing and Stratoscale isn't averse to describing the results as “hyperconverged” to cover all the buzzword bases.

Whatever you call the resulting rig, it uses formats compatible with AWS to make hybrid clouds easier to conceive and operate. The new Symphony 3 release adds the ability to treat the logical pool as an AWS region, mimicking the mighty, city-spanning multi-bit-barn brews that Amazon creates in the cities if favours with its presence.

This time around there's also compatibility with Amazon's S3 cloud storage service, as the new release adds the ability to run object storage side by side with block storage inside the same pool of x86.

Stratoscale CEO and founder Ariel Maislos is betting that organisations building private clouds will want them to be compatible with the big public clouds. He feels that plenty of users will feel that private clouds are a stepping-stone to cloud migrations, making the intermediate step of converged infrastructure on appliances with their roots in server virtualisation a hindrance to future migration plans.

At the moment the scoreboard says he's not winning: between Nutanix, Simplivity and the hordes of virtualisation-centric converged appliances offered by HPE and Dell EMC, the VM-centric approach has plenty of points on the board. Yet all players agree the hybrid cloud game has scarcely begun.

And Nutanix will also, in its quieter moments, admit it wouldn't mind being able to sell more software and spend less time in the hardware business. Stratoscale's already offering a pure-play software story, which could prove potent as the game evolves. ®