Cloudian is building ruggedised object storage devices for the IoT edge market in Japan via its EDGEMATRIX subsidiary.
The idea edge device sensors such as video cameras generate enormous data. This can be used in applications such as city traffic and pedestrian flow management, environmental and operations control in smart buildings and factories, and customising roadside advertising displays for oncoming vehicles.
Decisions about incoming data content are complex and need to be made in realtime, necessitating artificial intelligence-type software models and local data analytics processing by hardware devices running application and storage software. GPUs will enable machine learning models to be processed.
Cloudian has set up EDGEMATRIX to build and sell deployment-ready edge devices for these applications.
The system software can send subsets of data analysed at the edge to a central storage repository using the S3 API. Customers can manage this S3-accessible data across on-premises and public cloud environments using Cloudian facilities.
Speeds and feeds
There are indoor and outdoor models with the outdoor product able to withstand 30 minutes under water. The basic specs are;
- Processing unit: NVIDIA Jetson TX2
- GPU: NVIDIA Pascal 256 CUDA cores
- CPU: ARM Cortex A57@ 2GHz + NVIDEA Denver2@2GHz
- Memory: 8GB 128‐bit LPDDR4 @ 1866MHz on board
- Storage hardware: 128GB NVMe SSD
- Storage software: Cloudian HyperStore
- Networking: LTE, Wifi, Gbit Ethernet x 2, HDMI, USB, Power over Ethernet (for cameras, etc.)
The systems will come in Light (Jetson Nano), Standard (Jetson TX-2) and Advanced (Intel Core i7, Tesla T-4 GPU) configurations.
The standard and advanced boxes are available in the fourth quarter. The light box should be released by the end of the year.
Business set-up
EDGEMATRIX is majority-owned by Cloudian and run by co-founder Hiroshi Ohta.
The company has raised $9m from a group of strategic investors that include NTT DOCOMO. SHIMIZU Corp. and Japan Post Capital, as well as Cloudian CEO and co-founder Michael Tso and board director Jonathan Epstein. SHIMIZU constructs smart buildings and NTT DOCOMO is a mobile telco with developing 5G Interests.
In an announcement Ohta said: “In just a short time, we have built a compelling product, an initial base of top-tier customers and a range of strategic partnerships.”
Cloudian CEO Michael Tso contributed this quote: “By establishing the EDGEMATRIX subsidiary, we can align more closely with our strategic partners in AI.”
