We have seen a few products crop up over the years that attempt enable use of object storage in nontraditional ways. These solutions usually use a VM or appliance that acts as a gateway or cache. While this type of approach is useful for certain use cases, it is not necessarily optimal for all. It is particularly ill-suited for the mobile and geographically dispersed workforces previously mentioned. Recently at Cloud Field Day 6, we heard about a new approach to leveraging object storage in the enterprise from LucidLink.
