Cloudian has increased HyperStore storage capacity by 80 per cent, courtesy of a strategic deal with Seagate.
The object storage software company today launched Xtreme, the third member of the HyperStore line-up. joining the 1500 and 4000.
The 1500 is a 1U rack enclosure with 12 x 12TB disk drives, adding up to 144TB raw capacity. These are 7.200rpm, SAS drives which are hot-swappable. The system functions as a single node in Cloudian’s object system. There are two SSDs for handling metadata operations.
The 4000 fits 2 nodes in a 4U chassis. This contains 70 disk drives with up to 12TB capacity. Maximum raw capacity is 840TB and the TB per rack unit (U) are 210; better than the 1500’s 144TB/U.
Open the Seagates
Xtreme is a rebadged Seagate EXOS system running HyperStore software and intended for private cloud installations. The system incorporates 96 disk drives, each holding to 16TB in capacity, providing up to 1,536TB raw capacity. That’s 384TB/U, or 83 per cent bigger than the 4000. Ten Xtreme’s in a rack will hold 15.36PB raw.
The EXOS chassis has 100 drive bays, and four are used for 1.92TB SSDs – two per node – speeding the metadata operations.
A point release of HyperStore, v7.1.5, is needed to run Xtreme.
Seagate and Cloudian
Seagate disk drive tech will be incorporated into the HyperStore line more quickly, according to Cloudian. This implies that Seagate HAMR and multi-actuator drives will arrive in HyperStore products closer to Seagate’s product announcements.
The Seagate tie-in gives Cloudian a roadmap to 20TB-plus and beyond capacity drives with two read/write heads per drive – faster IO in other words – as well as to all-flash nodes.
Seagate’s Ken Claffey, GM for Seagate’s enterprise data centre solutions, told us the company had to pay a lot of attention to heat dissipation and controlling vibration, because of the drive packing density. The implication here is that disk drive manufacturers can do this better than disk array suppliers.
Cloudian CEO Michael Tso said the Seagate relationship meant customers could have confidence that HyperStore will follow the disk drive and chassis price/capacity/performance trends over the next three to five years. This is relevant to enterprise customers who install multi-petabyte systems on-premises.
Claffey pointed out that Seagate sees a lot of growth in private cloud business.
At present the HyperStore Xtreme costs under 0.5c per GB/month. This should lower as disk capacities grow.
Why did Cloudian partner with Seagate? Western Digital has its own ActiveScale object storage product line. Now Seagate, via Cloudian, can respond to that.
WD tends to go up the storage stack with its own products, while Seagate prefers to do it through partnerships and OEM deals, such as this one with Cloudian.
Cloudian recently announced native S3-compatible object storage for VMware. It now has a box that can provide such storage for a huge number of VMs.
