PacketFabric announced it acquired Rstor today in a move that should bolster both organizations to deliver fast, reliable networking of cloud traffic and infrastructure.  Today, many organizations are faced with the Cloud Networking challenge of staying on-prem, going all-in on cloud resources or having a hybrid approach.  Covid shined the light for many IT organizations who had large corporate WANs routing between offices/nodes globally only to find employees immediately required access from their remote home office.  VPNs, re-routes, traffic tromboning, and more began as network teams were faced.

 

Companies quickly lifted and shifted applications, contact centers, and other resources into more cloud instances, sometimes multiple providers.  However, in the swiftness of change, teams did not realize what they were losing from a traditional carrier SDWAN.  Often, they did not have to architect a truly low-latent, cost-effective cloud networking path for the remote users across the ether.  PacketFabric has been solving Public Cloud and Data Center connectivity options across their independent private backbone to accommodate this challenge.

 

 

Why is the Rstor acquisition by PacketFabric a good move in the cloud networking ecosystem?  Let’s dive in first on a brief background of both organizations and how this can benefit IT teams.  For many stand-alone network organizations, delivering connectivity with a cloud infrastructure as an option is really an ideal scenario.

 

 

Packet Fabric acquires Rstor

 

 

Who is Rstor & what does PacketFabric provide on top of their offering?

 

Space:  Their RSTOR Space product boasts super-fast stating it is 10x faster compared to Amazon S3 which is impressive.  It’s an Object Storage based environment with predictable pay-as-you-go cloud costs posted on their website.  Additionally, their Space environment is geolocated across the globe providing availability not just in your home region.

 

            PacketFabric Advantages:

  1. Connecting to Space (this sounds like NASA stuff) on Rstor must happen with carrier-grade precision. Queue PacketFabric to deliver Point to Point or their Cloud Router option for lightning speed.

 

Rstor’s Space offering also provides 11 9’s….99.9999999 which is as close to 100% as you’ll find in the cloud wars generally.  Another key feature of this environment is there are no egress/ingress charges as data routes between their infrastructure.  Unlike many of the traditional public cloud providers who charge nominal fees for data leaving their environment, Rstor does not.

 

PacketFabric Advantage

  1. The ability to route traffic using a private connection at Layer 1/2 using layer 3 protocols while not having to explain to customers the dilution of egress charges is a plus. PacketFabric equally can leverage its large customer base to discuss Object Storage options as a turn-key approach

 

Rstor also provides its Transporter product which provides an option to move objects across in-tow storage buckets or those residing with other clouds.  The service certainly touts an easy setup process:  Identify your source bucket and begin authentication then select your destination bucket and begin its authentication.  As everything completes from a security perspective, that it’s you are finished which makes this process for dev teams extremely easy to deploy.

 

PacketFabric Advantage

  1. Turning up Transporter will get easier once both organizations combine the products together. PacketFabric brings years of private software-defined cloud connectivity options for customers and continues its reach across the world.  Overlaying Transporter on the PacketFabric backbone and deploying the service which is simple to deploy as previously discussed will deliver great results.  For one, customers can experience ongoing network support and excellent SLAs while continuing to deploy Transporter’s easy-to-use offering.  Transporter now can reach much further for clients regardless of their workload requirements in various public clouds.

 

 

 

Finally, as you evaluate this acquisition, it’s clear PacketFabric has a good vision to diversify its portfolio of cloud connectivity.  Learning from prior carrier mistakes, they have surgically chosen an acquisition key for their customer base vs. trying to take on a complete public cloud offering as others failed to do in the past.

If you are interested in a demo of PacketFabric and how to connect privately across your public cloud or datacenter footprint, please contact us.  One of our architects will align a brief discussion and you would be amazed how quickly their environment builds….no more pounding on the command line or having to be a CCIE any longer!