US-based colocation provider 365 Data Centers has diversified into cloud storage, kicking off the sales of an enterprise-class storage-as-a-service (STaaS) platform across 17 of its US facilities.

The 365 Cloud Storage offers fine-grained controls, self-service provisioning and high security on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The STaaS platform is the first of many solutions the company is developing to position itself as a hybrid cloud and data center services provider in North America.

Diversity

The company says its STaaS offering is suitable for a wide variety of use cases including clustered databases, big data analytics, file storage, archiving, storage migration, backup, remote disaster recovery and temporary workloads.

By combining colocation and cloud services, 365 reduces the distance between customer applications and storage, resulting in lower latency. According to the company, customers can expect latency of less than four milliseconds when connected via metro Ethernet or metro fiber. Within the data center itself, latency stands at less than one millisecond.

365 says its platform can also reduce the cost of managing and maintaining IT infrastructure. It supports both Storage Area Networks (SAN) for block-based storage and Network Attached Storage (NAS) for file sharing. Customers have a choice of HDDs and SSDs connected via SATA or SAS, and the data can be encrypted, both at rest and in flight.

365 Cloud Storage is fully Integrated with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure environments. Pay-as-you-go pricing starts at US$0.05 per GB per month, and free trials are available.

CEO John Scanlon said 365 Cloud Storage is a critical piece of its strategy to transition from being a pure colo provider to a hybrid cloud and data center services provider.

“Businesses continue to struggle with the non-stop growth and management of storage. It is costly and risky to buy dedicated storage. Public cloud providers have been unable to crack the enterprise cloud storage market because it requires businesses to move both applications and data into the cloud,” Scanlon said.