Akamai beefs up cloud storage offering with acquisition

CDN specialist Akamai has acquired cloud storage technology provider Ondat in a surprising move that will beef up its own Connected Cloud offering, launched only a few days ago. 

Details of the acquisition of the London-based company have not been disclosed and the acquisition is expected to close by the end of March 2023.

Ondat competes with the likes of Portworx (now part of Pure Storage) and OpenEBS in the red hot market of software-defined, cloud native storage for Kubernetes and is application, infrastructure and orchestration agnostic.

Beyond Content Delivery Networks

It has a tiered offering with a free community one that delivers unlimited clusters, unlimited nodes and 1TB capacity per cluster going all the way to an enterprise one with unlimited cloud storage capacity, 24/7 support and a dedicated account manager for as little as $750 per node per year for a virtual machine (not bare metal). 

Akamai has evolved from one of the world’s largest CDN into an entity that aspires to “power and protect life online” and interacts with billions of end users every day via a backbone that is present in more than 130 countries in nearly 4,200 locations.

Its acquisition of web hosting company Linode, in March 2022, expanded the global footprint of Akamai giving it the necessary tools to compete on equal footing with archrival CloudFlare as well as hyperscalers that have increasingly expanded their own offerings to compete with traditional CDN.

Its global footprint means that workloads can transparently be executed closer to where they are needed, regardless of the location. It has also aggressively been expanding the number of products and services it offers, currently topping 82 at the time of writing. 

Beyond cloud hosting and VPS, Akamai offers ZTNA services, Cloud Firewall, DNS management, Cloud backup and DDoS protection amongst others. It has recently announced a reduction of the price of egress overage by 50% (up to 1PB per month) which it considers to be one of the biggest pain points for its customers (and the rest of the cloud computing industry). 

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.