CloudCasa adds features in sprint for cloud-native app backup

Newbie containerised app backup supplier Catalogic is adding a slew of new features, including virtual air-gapped ransomware protection in AWS and Azure to its CloudCasa BaaS offering.

CloudCasa, launched in November last year, is Catalogic’s main focus following the sale of its ECX copy data management software to IBM in May. It provides scalable data protection, with a free service tier, and disaster recovery service for cloud-native apps, and supports all leading Kubernetes distributions and managed services and cloud database services.

Catalogic COO Sathya Sankaran said in a statement: “We are pleased to introduce new features to CloudCasa, including the choice of public clouds and regions, to provide air-gapped backup storage for ransomware protection, and to provide a promotion for early registrants to protect up to 5TB for free.”

The added features are:

  • Support for Azure cloud storage along with Amazon S3 to store backups in [virtual] air-gapped storage for ransomware protection;
  • Choice of cloud storage regions to support data sovereignty and optimise data transfer costs;
  • Kubernetes Persistent Volume (PV) backups with 5TB free promotion for early access registrants;
  • Support for Amazon EBS persistent volumes for Amazon EKS in addition to CSI volumes;
  • Other service improvements such as tag-based selection for Amazon RDS backups and security and operations improvements.
Supplied diagram

The free service tier that lets users backup their K8s metadata and resource data to CloudCasa’s storage, and orchestrate Container Storage Interface (CSI) PV snapshots on their Kubernetes clusters. It also allows creation and management of AWS RDS database snapshots. A CloudCasa console enables users to scan their cloud-native application environment for recovery points and always be aware of how protected they are.

Comment

CloudCasa is complementary to Catalogic’s open-source KubeDR software, catering to some overlapping use cases, but delivering additional protection for CSI persistent volumes (PVs).

Catalogic is developing premium CloudCasa service offerings that it says will be coming soon, with additional features such as being able to move backup data from a user’s cloud off onto its cloud. In the third 2021 quarter we should see a premium tier available for PV backups, along with some other object storage and marketplaces that will be supported.

Road map items for the future include additional application hooks, more relational database service support, and a “bring your own keys model” for encryption. 

The suppliers competing for cloud-native app data backup include Clumio, Commvault, Dell EMC PowerProtect, Druva, HYCU, NetApp Astra, Pure’s Portworx, Robin.IO, Rook, StorageOS, Veeam’s Kasten and others. Several provision storage and migrate cloud-native apps as well as protect data. It’s likely, we think, that CloudCasa will also provide cloud-native app migration, and hence a form of disaster recovery, but not necessarily storage provisioning.

Having a free storage tier should help CloudCasa gain new users.

Download a CloudCasa datasheet here.