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We use a consensus based Borda Count voting system where voters can make up to 5 choices per single vote in order of preference. The overall winner in each category is whoever gets the most total points in two rounds. Round 1 voting is open until November 23, 2012. Final round is scheduled on December 12, 2012 during UP 2012 conference.

Update: First round is used to select top 5 candidates to participate in the final and decisive round. Points collected in first round do not count towards final round. The entry that gets most votes in the final round will be the winner in category.

First round is over. See list of finalists at this link.
Please see below a Cloud Awards Daily Overview:
08:30am - 03:30pm - Registration in SSFCC Lobby.
08:30am - 04:00pm - Voting Stations Opened in Hyde Park Section of Exhibit Hall.
11:30am - 01:00pm - Elevator Pitch Fest in Hyde Park Section of Exhibit Hall.
04:00pm - 06:00pm - Voting Closed, Results Counted and Winners Announced in Baden Room.

Best Cloud Storage Solution 2012

Ikoula, SolidFire

15% (12822 points)

Hewlett Packard

12% (10347 points)

Dell Inc. , Bitcasa

7% (6772 points)

TwinStrata

5% (4601 points)

StorSimple, Caringo, CloudSigma, Symform

3% (3080 points)

Egnyte, Zadara Storage Inc.

2% (2070 points)

Maldivica, Nexenta Systems, AIRWare Technology Ltd. UK, Sonian Inc., Axcient Inc., StorVault Africa, CX, Nomadesk, Quantum, Evault, DICOM Grid

1% (1162 points)

VirtualSharp Software, CEPTES Software Private Ltd., CloudPointe LLC

0% (563 points)

Total votes: 3349

Nominees

AIRWare Technology Ltd. UK

Our software was designed to make securing and shipping simple or complex data easy. Virtually 100% automated, AIRShip has also been designed to work elegantly with any cloud provider. With AIRShip, users can push to any local or distant cloud location and store there for future uses including authenticated access or push. All using AES-256 encryption while in transit and while at rest in cloud. The user controls security and access from a simple, secure web portal. Local "Cargo" at a user location can also be "LiveSynced" with the matching Cargo in cloud. Changes to local Cargo are automatically synced with cloud copies by securely moving the diffs only. Users can grant secure access rights to specific Cargo for subsequent “pulls”. Beyond encryption, AIRShip also optimizes transport speed with “zero overhead” on complex directories of 1,000s of individual files plus multi-threaded, stable shipping acceleration along with lossless data compression to make best use of bandwidth. Combine this with auto-recovery from network, power or system outages for completely dependable delivery with no human intervention. All designed in a user friendly interface with all complexity under the hood for simple operation and interfacing with cloud services.
Axcient, Inc.

Axcient puts an end to downtime by enabling businesses to store, protect and access all their information and systems, all the time, from anywhere. Unlike legacy backup and disaster recovery, Axcient’s next-generation cloud platform eliminates the loss of productivity, revenue and reputation that results from downtime – along with doing away with data loss. Every year businesses lose over $60 billion to downtime and even the smallest businesses risk over $12,000 per day in losses. But when an IT emergency happens, an Axcient customer can instantly virtualize their IT infrastructure in the cloud and keep their business running. We allow our customers to focus on business opportunities, not IT risks.
Bitcasa

Founded by former Mastercard and Mozy employees and backed by top-tier investors Andreessen Horowitz, Crunch Fund, First Round Capital, and Pelion Venture Partners, Bitcasa is changing the way consumers and SMBs are storing their data. By using client-side encryption and encrypted deduplication techniques, the Bitcasa virtual storage model integrates “infinite storage,” sync, backup and sharing across all of the devices for $10/month, offering users as much storage as they need in the cloud without the hassle of managing local storage. Bitcasa doesn’t only copy your files to the cloud; it provides unlimited storage. The virtual storage model also allows users to sync data across devices and share large files, providing a secure alternative to online backup solutions.
Caringo

As the leader in the object storage space Caringo’s CAStor offers a powerful, massively scalable solution that delivers significant breakthroughs for enterprise and private cloud storage/Big Data infrastructures while offering scaling named objects, multi-tenancy, plug-and-play throughput, seamless remote replication and more. Utilizing any combination of standard x86 server hardware, any size hard drive and any type of storage, CAStor pools server and networking resources combining them with advanced management, optimization, and self-healing technology.The result is a unified storage system utilizing a single namespace that can scale to billions of objects and petabytes per location with superb performance, and guaranteed data protection. Considering cloud storage has changed the landscape of IT, enabling infinite scalability and affordability, the real hidden burden of a cloud storage platform is that they are based on a 20th century file systems that hinder true administration, scalability and cost. The answer is clearly an object based storage infrastructure, the characteristics of object storage are ideally aligned with cloud storage platforms, delivering a superior cloud storage experience with better scalability, accessibility and affordability. Power conservation is also a critical element of CAStor as it features Darkive, a patent-pending adaptive power conservation technology that monitors storage systems operations and automatically spins down disks and reduces CPU utilization thus allowing for lower energy and cooling costs. CAStor offers many features that make it a leader within the Object Storage arena: - CAStor offers a plug-and-play scale by simply inserting one, or more nodes into a cluster allowing for additional capacity that can scale to multiple petabytes in a single cluster. - Simple self-management is key function that enables CPU loads to be distributed and balanced organically. - Eliminates the complexity of hierarchical file system architectures, no limits on the quantity of files or capacity limits. - Easy installation as CAStor software can boot from a USB key. Lastly, CAStor is the software behind the Dell’s popular DX object storage solution.
CEPTES Software Private Ltd

Xfiles- External File Management This integration solution is to save salesforce customers 50-60% of cost on storage with salesforce. Our solution gives business freedom from salesforce limitations and storage cost. With our solution, business can store all its documents and contents to an external storage system ( Currently supports Amazon S3) and seamlessly integrate with Documents and Content of salesforce. Our key feature is the integration of the solution with the Attachments of Salesforce. Our solution, helps business to attach links to your attachments which is one of important feature which all salesforce customers are looking forward. Our application is available in AppExchange with the below listing: https://sites.secure.force.com/appexchange/listingDetail?listingId=a0N30000009gpUHEAY Also visit our website for more details on the application : http://www.ceptes.com/xfiles/
CloudPointe LLC

CloudPointe is a content protection service that consolidates and simplifies access, control and management for documents, media files and other digital content on public and private clouds. We believe it is far better to bring users to your contnet than it is to copy and duplicate sensitive files outside the enterprise and onto personal devices. The CloudPointe Connect API is the basis for our solution. You do not entrust us, or anybody else, with your content. You choose how and where your digital assets reside and never duplicate files or workspaces. CloudPointe securely connects establishing a single-source of authenticity for all digital assets. You choose how users interact with your content by specifying access control levels per external user group. CloudPointe enables you to grant simultaneous access to the same content with several people and allow each a different access control level. This is supported outside the firewall with customers, partners and suppliers as they can authorize you to securely access content behind their firewall. CloudPointe virtually consolodates access to your disparate content depots into one logical workspace that you access and manage from any deskdop or mobile web browser.
CloudSigma

The cloud storage market is predicted to reach $22.6 billion by 2015, according to IDC, but it’s no secret that storage bottlenecks are one of the biggest challenges in the cloud. Recent growth in large-scale virtual deployments has only exacerbated the issue with a surge in the amount of random input/output (I/O) operations between VMs and traditional, magnetic-based storage systems. Such storage systems are not suited for the randomized, multi-tenant access of a public cloud, and therefore cause massive performance bottlenecks. This is especially the case since magnetic storage products can only process thousands of I/O operations per second, meaning they force today’s powerful CPUs to wait until the I/O transactions have completed, thereby holding up data access, resources and performance. CloudSigma SSD resolves these issues with its high-performance capabilities and unprecedented availability and reliability. CloudSigma SSD is the first solid state drive (SSD) storage offering for a public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environment. It eliminates storage bottlenecks and variable performance in the cloud, achieving unprecedented cost efficiency and seamless delivery. CloudSigma SSD is offered through CloudSigma’s IaaS platform, which offers highly-available, flexible, enterprise-class cloud servers and cloud hosting solutions, both in Europe and the U.S. With CloudSigma SSD, companies can achieve higher performance, at a fraction of the cost, while handling the explosion of I/O operations caused by the increasing adoption of server virtualization. Beyond storage bottlenecks and performance concerns, CloudSigma SSD eliminates issues around traditional magnetic storage solutions’ inability to keep pace with the requirements of a multi-tenant environment, such as a public cloud. The implementation of SSD storage in IaaS public clouds gives enterprises the compute power and storage capacity they need to keep up with ever increasing volumes of data. With the industry’s first SSD storage offering for public cloud environments, CloudSigma is delivering the innovation the cloud storage market needs to reach such high estimated growth levels.
CX

CX is a cloud technology company dedicated to simplifying how people interact with media and making it easier than ever to access and share content wherever you go. Unlike most cloud providers who just store and sync your stuff, CX has set out to change the whole nature of what content in the cloud can be by creating unique new ways to find it, organize it, share it and work on it, alone or in teams. With 10GB of free storage.
Dell Inc.

Addressing the Big Data challenge in Healthcare. Medical imaging makes up for 1/3rd of all Healthcare data and is growing 42% YoY. To add to that the proprietary nature of the imaging data has created silos of clinical information that is becoming increasingly difficult to manage, protect and share. The Dell Unified Clinical Archive (UCA) provides an innovative solution to address the medical imaging Big Data challenge. The UCA portfolio includes the Dell Cloud Clinical Archive (DCCA) that provides vendor-neutral archiving delivered through a hybrid cloud-based platform. The solution is delivered as a managed service thereby significantly reducing the maintenance and technology obsolescence / refresh costs. It provides reliable disaster recovery and data protection by archiving medical imaging data in highly secure and geographically separate Dell Datacenters. It follows industry standards (IHE Framework) to facilitate the secure exchange of data, necessary to drive collaborative care. Dell’s focus and leadership in medical imaging has received industry recognition as the 2012 North American Enterprise Imaging Informatics Company of the Year by Frost and Sullivan. (report attached).
DICOM Grid

I would like to nominate DICOM Grid (DG) for Best Cloud Storage. The DG elevator pitch! DICOM Grid powers real-time medical image exchange. The DG Suite is a global, cloud-based solution that transforms the way studies are managed, shared, and stored. Instantly connect patients, doctors, and facilities through our online image exchange platform. Why award DICOM Grid? DICOM Grid provides a robust, global cloud storage solution that enables doctors and healthcare facilities the ability to archive and share medical images safely and securely. DG is a disruptive innovator in the healthcare industry Cloud storage methods are extremely underutilized in the healthcare industry today. Antiquated archiving methods are used by facilities to file medical images. Images are stored on physical machines or are printed and stored on shelves. These methods are extremely cumbersome and costly. By storing images in the cloud, healthcare facilities can save money, increase storage capacity, create a disaster recovery plan, all while complying with HIPAA requirements. DG currently manages over 500 million images for clients in the cloud. Every day images are being uploaded onto the DG platform and shared with doctors and facilities worldwide. For more information contact: Dana Tee dtee@dicomgrid.com 978.501.6971
Egnyte

The Egnyte cloud storage solution is two-fold. The Egnyte Local Cloud is private cloud storage that holds local copies of business files on the computer, network-attached storage, virtual machine or unified storage systems which are automatically synchronized with the Cloud File Server. From office to home, and everywhere in between, users can access their secure files easily without having to worry about an internet connection.
Evault

The EVault Company has provided resellers with unique and customised solution that enhance all vendors to be competitive
Hewlett Packard

HP 3PAR Storage is the only storage platform that can meet the demands of the modern data center. With a range of models, HP 3PAR Storage delivers the efficiency and agility required by the most demanding virtual, cloud and IT-as-a-Service environments.
Ikoula

Founded in February 1998, Ikoula is a French webhosting provider. Today, Ikoula is recognized for its expertise, project management and the quality of services provided. With annual revenues of 6 million Euros in 2011, Ikoula hosts over 35,000 sites and holds more than 5000 servers. Where traditionally hosting services are charged according to the space used, Ikoula, French webhosting specialist, has a unique and innovative Cloud offering: an unlimited plan for its storage solution iKeepinCloud. iKeepinCloud is Ikoula’s innovative online, open source storage solution for all end users. Whether you are a professional user, a developer or even an individual user, this solution is great for you. This solution offers unlimited traffic and storage: 10 Mbps speed with unlimited file size. All parameters are taken into account in this offering designed to meet the changing needs of all end users. A concept of unlimited supply, with such benefits, for € 19.99 per month is revolutionary in the hosting world! ... That meets the market demand Businesses and professionals were waiting for this type of solution that allows them to now work with even more serenity. Storage solution, backup and public or private sharing, iKeepinCloud guarantees security and confidentiality. Ikoula duplicates data on 3 different servers, hosted solely in France. An affordable offer for a safe, fast and intuitive solution Accessible via 7 different communication protocols, iKeepinCloud requires no software while providing maximum interactivity with a large number of additional third-party software from any terminal PC, Mac, Linux, tablet or Smartphone. It therefore offers broad compatibility with various computer languages and allows complete usage flexibility for developers. Ikoula’s technical teams supervise the iKeepinCloud platform 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Our technical support responsiveness is unanimously praised by all of our customers.
Maldivica

For companies who are trying to fit cloud storage into their toolbag of technologies, Maldivica makes integration easy, solving for a number of problems that individually aren't difficult, but collectively can pose a significant barrier to adoption. Any org thinking about cloud storage should be thinking about Maldivica.
Nexenta Systems

Nexenta Systems provides an enterprise-class, OpenStorage, software-only platform, NexentaStor, which delivers high-performance, ultra-scalable, cloud-optimized storage management. In a world in which data growth rates are exploding, innovative storage technologies have become the secret ingredient to rolling out public cloud services. NexentaStor is the leader in three crucial categories: scalability, interoperability and cost-effectiveness. With NexentaStor, cloud providers can develop a public cloud within a matter of months and at unprecedented low cost. Nexenta’s solutions cost on average 70%-80% less than comparable solutions from EMC or NetApp, and are used in some of the world’s largest public clouds, including KT’s uCloud, the largest public cloud in Asia. Hardware-agnostic NexentaStor minimizes storage costs by leveraging all available resources into a single pool and allowing capacity and performance to grow, as needed, with commodity hardware. NexentaStor-powered storage provides cloud companies with the ability to provision, on demand, petabytes of high-performance, enterprise-class storage by fitting into the automated provisioning and management systems used by cloud service providers. With Nexenta, companies can amplify cloud benefits with advanced storage and data management technologies. Performance and IT efficiency improve while administrative costs drop dramatically. · Cloud storage efficiency: Deduplication, thin provisioning, compression, and reservations and quotas help reduce capacity requirements while lowering costs by up to 70%. · Virtualized storage: Supports multiple workloads on a single, scalable architecture. Unifies storage management for VMware, Citrix Xen, and Hyper-V. · Scale up, Scale out: Supports volume growth, global namespace, and unlimited capacity to meet business-critical demands with cloud computing. · Comprehensive data protection: Auto-Sync, Auto-Tier, Auto-CDP for back-up, disaster recovery, maintenance, archiving, and compliance. · Operational simplicity: Single console management, monitoring, real time analytics, DTRACE, availability alerts,REST APIs, unlimited snapshots, and cloning.
Nomadesk

Nomadesk is a leading provider of file sharing, storage and synchronization software that enables users to share files online and provides unlimited virtual storage. Customers can access, share, synchronize and safeguard files from any location, whether online or offline. The company has achieved great progress in revenue growth, enterprise sales, and the addition of several new strategic partners. Nomadesk’s H1 revenues were 300% higher than the previous half and are on track for 3x YoY growth in 2012, and EBITDA results improved by 63% in the same period. With offices in Ghent, Belgium, Austin, Texas and Singapore, Nomadesk delivers a business class file sharing solution around the globe. Nomadesk offers a comprehensive partnership program for software sales firms, and provides exclusive collaboration services for some of the largest business consulting firms in the world.
Quantum

Quantum's Q-Drive technology allows users to back-up to the cloud without having the expense of a backup-specific device on site. This is the best possible solution for SMBs. Period.
SolidFire

SolidFire delivers high-performance data storage systems for cloud service providers. Leveraging an all-flash scale-out storage architecture with patented volume-level quality-of-service (QoS) controls, providers can now guarantee storage performance to thousands of applications within shared infrastructures. By using real-time data reduction techniques and system-wide automation, SolidFire is fuelling new and profitable block-storage services that are advancing the way the world uses the cloud.
Sonian, Inc.

Built from the ground up using best of breed cloud computing technologies, Sonian is the pioneer in cloud-powered archiving and search. It's no hardware, no software installation policy allows users to have their archive up and running within minutes. The Sonian architecture provides an unlimited amount of storage with infinite elasticity - giving users 24/7 accessibility to their archive. By leveraging Amazon Web Services, Sonian has the ability to provide unmatched data resiliency, complying with PCI-DSS, ISO 27001 and FISMA policies. After a year of record growth, Sonian has doubled its consumer base, providing over 11,000 customers with an innovative cloud service that enables organizations to comply with industry regulations within a mandated timeframe, meet eDiscovery needs and reduce IT costs and eliminate maintenance fees.
StorSimple

StorSimple allows enterprise customers to get cloud economics of scale for enterprise storage. We do this by automating the most difficult storage management tasks, including backup, archiving and tiering - but by also moving inactive data to the cloud, freeing capacity on expensive on-premises storage arrays. Customers get a 60-80% reduction on the TCO of storage using StorSimple.
StorSimple

StorSimple Cloud-integrated Storage (CiS) appliances leverage cloud storage for managing data growth and automating data protection. StorSimple CiS storage systems have both SSD and HDD tiers but also use cloud storage services to create a third tier in the cloud. CiS is an enabling technology that lets enterprise customers take advantage of cloud pay-as-you-grow economics for their primary storage capacity. Customers use StorSimple CiS systems to completely automate backup and recovery, significantly reducing the time and effort involved. StorSimple CiS is Windows and VMware Ready certifications.
Storvault Africa

I think Storvault Africa should win this award because of the exclusitivity it has brought as a reseller to South Africa and Africa as a whole, The EVault Cloud Backup Solution(A Seagate Company). And that includes also taking-on the big risk and the challenge in a continent with huge bandwidth challenges and fear-of-the-cloud minded coperations and still make it to work and customised to serve client needs.
Symform

Symform is disrupting the cloud storage market by providing the first-ever free and unlimited cloud storage and backup offering. Additionally, Symform provides its free storage solution without building an expensive, energy-hungry datacenter. Instead, Symform allows customers (prosumers and businesses) to contribute excess local storage in exchange for data storage in the cloud. This contributed storage space is what creates Symform’s global cloud storage network, which is on track to become the world’s largest, crowdsourced virtual datacenter.
TwinStrata

TwinStrata is a leader and innovator in the enterprise-class data storage arena. With solutions that offer data protection and disaster recovery/business continuity solutions utilizing Cloud Storage, TwinStrata enables companies of all sizes to efficiently and economincally leverage the scalability of the Cloud, while maintaining the availability, performance, and security of local storage. 2012 has been a great year for the company, as TwinStrata has won many new customers, expanded their partner program and has won a handful of industry awards, but hasn’t slacked on the technology front with the release of several new Cloud Storage based solutions. In August, the company unveiled their In-Cloud storage gateway version of the popular CloudArray appliance, allowing customers to have: Off-cloud replication, multi-region, multi-site data replication for Cloud applications, unlimited storage capacity and disaster recovery for on-premise applications. The CloudArray In-Cloud Storage gateway also has the ability to run on many of the today’s top Cloud computing environments such as IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, Rackspace, Amazon EC2 and Google. Also in August, TwinStrata noticed a need for an enterprise-grade cloud storage solution that could be implemented easily, affordably and quickly, thus the company teamed up with Nirvanix, a leader in the Cloud storage market to create the first Cloud Storage Starter Kit for rapid enterprise deployments. The cloud starter kit provides the infrastructure enterprise customers need for backup, archiving, and global collaboration in one solution under one integrated set of SLAs Recently TwinStrata announced a new subscription based offering for the CloudArray solution. Realizing the need for organizations of all sizes to have access to cost-effective Cloud Storage, propelled the company to focus on offering a more simplistic and flexible payment structure. Designed to address the needs of both small and large organizations, CloudArray Subscription delivers accessibility, security, performance and simplicity, enabling organizations to support multiple concurrent use cases and seamlessly use cloud storage as another tier of storage. In addition to obtaining a robust storage infrastructure, premium support, cloud snapshots and multi-tenant capabilities, customers of the new offering get tiered pay-as-you-go pricing and access to CloudArray software or hardware cloud storage gateways for the same flat monthly rate, without upcharges for bandwidth usage or other variable fees.
VirtualSharp Software

There are highly visible outages just about every month - not just Twitter, Salesforce and Blackberry, but also companies like the Royal Bank of Scotland who had to make a provision for over $200 million to pay compensation because of an outage in June. The outage was caused by a bad patch that reportedly went online without sufficient testing. This isn’t an isolated instance. With virtualization and the private cloud, applications are better protected than when they were physical, and it is possible to assure recovery across clouds. Most people don't realize how easy it has become. Replication is a mainstream technology that is now increasingly used by SMBs. Cloud providers see a huge opportunity here and position Recovery as a Service as a better, more robust solution than backup to tape - which is the DR technique of many or most SMB data centers. DR is a mandatory part of business that requires proper planning and execution. Most people know they should be DR testing frequently but very few do it more than once a year, and they follow a scripted procedure that has nothing to do with a real disaster. People also think that DR testing is expensive and cumbersome. They don't realize how easy and effective it has become. VirtualSharp, who pioneered the concept of Recovery Assurance, makes DR testing a mundane, boring and predictable task handled by software without human intervention. SLAs are tracked and enforced automatically, auditable anytime. And now VirtualSharp is helping customers take the first major step for free. At VMworld, VirtualSharp released a free edition of its ReliableDR product that can be used to replicate as often as needed.
Zadara Storage, Inc.

Enterprise IT is a multi-trillion dollar business which is largely staying out of the cloud. Why? Because Enterprise users demand the ability to run their existing applications, without the need to re-architect. And they demand the same reliability, privacy, performance and visibility offered by their on-premise environment. By bringing private Enterprise storage to the public cloud, Zadara Storage, at long last, makes it possible for Enterprise users to have it all: a no-compromise Enterprise environment in the cloud, with on-premise capabilities and cloud economics.

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Best Cloud Storage Solution 2012

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List of Nomination Categories

Register For Final Round of Cloud Awards

AIRWare Technology Ltd. UK

Axcient, Inc.

Bitcasa

Caringo

CEPTES Software Private Ltd

CloudPointe LLC

CloudSigma

CX

Dell Inc.

DICOM Grid

Egnyte

Evault

Hewlett Packard

Ikoula

Maldivica

Nexenta Systems

Nomadesk

Quantum

SolidFire

Sonian, Inc.

StorSimple

StorSimple

Storvault Africa

Symform

TwinStrata

VirtualSharp Software

Zadara Storage, Inc.