Seagate is equipping Equinix co-location data centres with its Lyve Drive racks in order to offer Lyve Cloud, an S3-compatible object storage as a service.
Lyve Cloud enables always-on mass capacity data storage and activation, according to Seagate, which is initially collaborating with Equinix in four of the latter’s US data centres. The company aims to offer additional cloud services and geographical expansion. Equinix has 55 data centres globally.
Equinix Chief Strategy Officer Eric Schwartz said: “We see a lot of synergy in collaborating with Seagate to help our customers increase their digital advantage. Leveraging Lyve Cloud and Platform Equinix, customers have an optimised, cost-effective object storage option to make their cloud truly composable.”
This is ‘composable’ in the sense that customers can rent a certain amount of capacity at a certain time and then cancel it later. It is not ‘composable’ in the generally understood definition of the term, namely real-time, dynamic server-storage-networking composability, as delivered by Liqid, Fungible, HPE Synergy, GigaIO and Dell EMC (MX7000).
Seagate said Lyve Cloud offers privacy, no lock-in, and no egress fees and lowers TCO for storing massive datasets. Commvault says its software is compatible with Lyve Cloud.
We understand that Lyve Cloud is based on Lyve Drive Racks with Exos AP (5U84) enclosures and MinIO, not Seagate’s own CORTX, object storage software. The enclosures contain up to 84 x 18TB Exos disk drives – 1.5PB of raw capacity – with up to 12PB in a full rack.
Seagate announced Lyve Data Services in December 2018 to move tape data to AWS. This could be an additional service for the Lyve Cloud. The company also has a modular set of Lyve Drive products for multi-stage workflow processes involving physically moving stored data. These could also be integrated into Lyve Cloud.
Seagate estimates that Lyve Cloud could address a $36bn TAM opportunity by 2025.
Today’s Lyve Cloud announcement contains no pricing details or specific US Equinix data centre locations. Nor does it mention which Seagate or Equinix partners will be selling the service.
