Download the White paper from https://maginatics.com/mcsp-solutions Today's evolving distributed enterprises deal with issues such as managing unstructured data growing at up to 80% annually. These challenges have made the IT managers address the issue with cloud-backed infrastructures or cloud storage application. Unfortunately, these technologies are often incompatible with existing storage products and addresses only part of the problem. Read more to understand how Maginatics Cloud Storage providers offer software-only solution that is specially designed for software-defined datacenters and cloud. It gives enterprises a revolutionary way to manage data growth while enabling agile IT.

1. Executive Summary:
Maginatics Cloud Storage
Platform
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2. © 2014 Maginatics. All rights reserved.
Just as virtualization has transformed data center operations, the emergence of cloud technologies, the plethora of
endpoint devices and clients and the consumerization of IT services present a new paradigm in the way IT needs
to operate storage. Gartner, Inc. reports that enterprise unstructured data is growing at up to 80% annually. At the
same time, companies are becoming more distributed, with 75% of today’s workforce becoming mobile. These
trends are creating challenges that many IT managers are starting to address with cloud-backed infrastructures.
Yet, these technologies can be incompatible with existing storage products, which feature inflexible and monolithic
architectures that are limited in scalability and suffer performance deficits for today’s evolving distributed enterprises
requirements.
Software-defined, cloud-based storage solutions have emerged as the front-running solution, offering massive cost
savings as proprietary, scale-up architectures—traditional and emerging—are replaced with commodity-based, scale-
out platforms. Unfortunately, cloud storage addresses only part of the problem. For example, organizations want to
continue with their existing applications rather than build new, cloud-ready versions.
Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform (MCSP) is a new class of storage technology. A software-only solution natively
designed for software-defined datacenters and cloud. MCSP gives enterprises a revolutionary way to manage data
growth while enabling agile IT. Maginatics’ unique architecture, in which the control plane and data plane are
completely separate from one another, eliminates the bottlenecks imposed by traditional storage platforms. MCSP
integrates seamlessly with most public and private object stores and addresses use cases of critical importance to
many enterprises.
MCSP has three components. At the foundation is the Maginatics Virtual Filer or MVF, a software solution that resides
in the datacenter or the cloud depending on user preference. MVF hosts all metadata including encryption keys. This
is where MCSP’s native integration with Active Directory occurs. Second, Maginatics provides native agents
for most popular operating systems and devices, from smartphones and laptops to servers and virtual machines.
These agents perform much of the ‘heavy lifting’ in the system, including WAN optimization and failsafe encryption.
The third component, chosen by the user, is the object store: a low cost, easily deployed storage tier supporting
billions of objects per namespace.
MCSP stands apart from other storage solutions in three areas.
1. Purpose-built to fully leverage cloud storage scalability
2. Distributed, with native clients that push intelligence to the edge and is optimized for remote and mobile devices
3. Enterprise-secure while delivering strong data consistency and highly-advanced caching
Executive Summary:
Maginatics Cloud Storage
Platform

3. © 2014 Maginatics. All rights reserved.
With unmatched scalability and elasticity, object storage was designed to address the challenges posed by massive data
growth, and MCSP was designed for object storage.
Benefits for enterprises using the Maginatics solution include:
• Reduced TCO by offering pay-as-you-grow pricing, just like the cloud
• Enterprise-grade security regardless of where data is stored or how it is accessed
• Enhanced productivity with anywhere, any-device access to centrally-managed data
• Simplified operations through abstraction of underlying storage hardware and single-pane-of-glass administration
• Dramatic performance gains enabled by Maginatics’ bottleneck-free, distributed architecture
Organizations deploy MCSP to address one of two major use cases:
1. Elastic NAS, which entails migrating entire CIFS or NFS-based workloads to the cloud for enhanced flexibility, lower cost and
essentially infinite scalability
2. NAS consolidation, which involves centralizing NAS data in object storage to slash costs and complexity while boosting agility
In both cases, the Maginatics solution does not require modifying the application or data. The enterprise requires a
ubiquitous platform that can abstract heterogeneous storage technologies and support a broad range of object stores.
Fully leveraging the benefits of object storage requires augmenting it with a cloud-optimized storage platform such as
the Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform - one that is natively designed for software-defined data centers and the cloud
and provides enterprises with a distributed, scalable and secure data storage solution.
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Sources:
Gartner, IT Marketing Clock for Storage, Sep 2011
Gartner, Forecast Overview: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2011-2016, Feb 2013