Amazon Web Services is the titan of the platform-as-a-service space, a status it has achieved thanks to its level of service, maintained by its sheer scale and reach today. As always, however, the IT market is an extremely competitive one, and OnApp is looking to challenge AWS with its new offering.

The OnApp Storage Software transforms physical drives into storage nodes with individual I/O controllers baked into them, creating a cloud platform running on top of a data center operator’s traditional infrastructure. OnApp goes beyond just this core concept by offering some added value as well, in the form of reduced bandwidth consumption (thanks to those controllers), and dedupe.

“The software also has deduplication and lets administrators choose the amount of redundancy they want for each piece of data,” writes ZDNet UK. For example, one file could be replicated once to every physical drive within the cloud SAN, for maximum redundancy.”

OnApp Storage lets smaller players setup a cloud environment of their own, and one that can be competitive at that. But it does face competition from a few other vendors that discovered the same opportunity, and the solution currently works only with OnApp Cloud. This is expected to change, as support will be extended to include major hypervisors and custom hardware in the future.

Vendors are targeting enterprises with new cloud services – with ones that are running on the client’s own on-premise deployment, as well public cloud-based offerings that seek to offer the same business edge.

Another development from this week falls under the latter category. Egnyte revealed a new service called HybridCloud File Sharing for the Enterprise, which will try to compete with the many alternatives out there by simply justifying its name. The platform can be scaled to power up to 10,000 concurrent users and 1 billion files.