Cloudian and Seagate partner to take on STaaS

Cloudian and Seagate Technology have partnered to provide storage density, scalability and economics for private cloud infrastructures with capacity needs of multi-petabytes to an exabyte.

The new 'Cloudian HyperStore Xtreme, Powered by Seagate' solution combines Cloudian's fully S3-compatible object storage software with Seagate's latest high-density storage systems to offer customers up to 70% lower total cost of ownership than Storage-as-a-Service options.

Private clouds are now the fastest growing segment of IT hardware infrastructure, with spending forecasted to increase 58% between 2018 and 2023, compared to 48% growth in public cloud spending and a 4% decline in traditional IT spending, according to IDC.

A key driver of private cloud adoption is enterprises with large-scale storage needs, such as those in healthcare, scientific research, surveillance, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and media and entertainment.

With capacity-intensive workloads that can reach tens of petabytes, these users face unique challenges in managing and protecting their large data sets.

While Storage-as-a-Service offerings provide scalability and flexibility, both the cost and the time to access data can be significant concerns in "super-capacity" use cases.

Similarly, traditional storage solutions also fall short because of cost, reliability and/or timely data access issues.

In contrast, private cloud infrastructures provide the scale and flexibility benefits of Storage-as-a-Service, along with the performance, access, security and control advantages of on-premises storage.

"Given the massive data demands of the modern large-scale enterprise, the time has come to rethink storage infrastructure design and target an entirely new level of scalability," says ESG senior analyst Scott Sinclair.

"Building private clouds today with traditional systems is sub-optimal, ultimately driving up costs as data grows and limiting the ability to leverage data for maximum value. The combination of Cloudian's object storage software and Seagate's system design expertise is a true game-changer, delivering innovation and economic savings that will enable customers to capitalise on new data-centric opportunities.

The new solution combines Cloudian software and a Seagate high-density storage platform to deliver limitless scalability, real-time data access and ground-breaking economics for large-scale private cloud buildouts.

Features include:

• Over 1.5 PB in a 4U height enclosure, providing up to 18 PB of storage in a single data center rack and 83% greater density than competing systems.
   
• Cost under 0.5c per GB/month, a savings of up to 70% vs. Storage-as-a-Service.
   
• Increased cost-efficiency as the solution scales, in contrast to traditional storage systems that become costlier per unit of storage as capacity grows.
   
• The ability to scale to an exabyte of capacity without interruption and span multiple locations while presenting all storage as a single pool.
   
• Highly compatible S3 object storage, proven interoperable with the rapidly expanding ecosystem of S3-based applications and cloud solutions.

In addition, Cloudian and Seagate each have key strengths that together provide customers with faster access to innovation and continuous cost savings over the life of the system:

• Seagate's parallel design process, whereby all components are designed by Seagate, accelerates component/system integration, enabling Cloudian and its customers to capitalise on new system technology innovations at least six months sooner than competitors' serial processes.
   
• Cloudian's software-defined technology allows all customers to benefit immediately from Seagate's most advanced cost-performance technologies, which were previously available only to a handful of hyper-scale storage users.

The Cloudian HyperStore Xtreme solution will be available from Cloudian and its resellers starting next month.