Seagate, Cloudian partner for high-density storage as a service

Data storage software vendor Cloudian has teamed up with Seagate Technology to offer a private cloud storage platform aimed at artificial intelligence (AI) and network-edge workloads. The two companies said they plan to deliver exabyte-scale private cloud storage on-premises while still compatible with Amazon Web Services’ S3 storage.

The new product is a mouthful and one only lawyers could have come up with: Cloudian HyperStore Xtreme, Powered by Seagate. Cloudian specializes in object storage platforms, which are already compatible with AWS S3, and Seagate is a major provider of hard disk technology along with Western Digital. In announcing the deal, Seagate said S3 was the motivator for making the alliance.

“As the S3 API is now the de facto standard for cloud storage, we see a tremendous opportunity in working together to help large enterprises realize the full potential of private cloud, with the scalability and cost benefits they seek,” said Ken Claffey, vice president and general manager, enterprise data solutions at Seagate, in a statement.

But instead of people moving data to the cloud, Seagate and Cloudian are betting more customers will move to private clouds as data intensive jobs such as AI, machine learning, and edge computing drive demand for ready access to large data sets.

The two companies cited IDC reports that say 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.

And with every hardware OEM offering cloud-like services on-premises, the pitch here is that storage as a service can provide scalability and flexibility, both in terms of cost and the time to access data in a way that traditional storage solutions can’t.

Cloudian HyperStore Xtreme can store up to 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 is under a half-cent per gigabyte per month, which the companies say is a savings of up to 70% vs. storage as a service.

The two firms also say cost-efficiency increases as the solution scales, and it can scale to an exabyte of capacity without interruption and span multiple locations while presenting all storage as a single pool.

Cloudian HyperStore Xtreme will be released next month through Cloudian and its resellers.