CommVault, the data management software company, on February 1, 2010 announced its Farline addition to its Simpana suite. With Farline, customers of several Cloud providers will be able to plug-in to Simpana with its new storage destination. In fact CommVault extends data movement across on-premises as well as Cloud.

Using native REST over HTTP, the APIs of Cloud providers such as Amazon S3, EMC Atmos, Iron Mountain’s Archive Services Platform, Microsoft Azure and Nirvanix SDN are all qualified at time of launch.

The synergies are pretty obvious with the (pure) storage software vendors wanting to support Cloud, and the Cloud providers conversely being even keener, craving growth and endorsement. Expect more deals like this to announced between software and cloud providers. There will no doubt be the usual co-opetition dilemmas to be sorted with hybrid models.

In preparation for its announcement, CommVault released a survey in January exploring customer attitudes to Cloud. The main findings in the headline cites “growing interest in Cloud” “Amid Security & Reliability Concerns”.

As stated in my January 14 blog Cloud-based-storage-and-content, cloud in itself is an outsourcing model, but is as much about an infrastructure model. However with storage Cloud, delegation of control and the physical migration of storage is a considerable leap of faith for IT professionals. A much easier proposition is in BC/DR where there is a clear need for off-site protection.

CommVault has hereby demonstrated that Cloud is supported, simple as that. What does not change is that the cloud vendors are still faced with a significant challenge of persuading customers that the Cloud model is good. Which is why January’s blog statement is unchanged, in that Enterprise IT and Cloud will not take off quickly.