Seagate’s Lyve Cloud will deploy Zadara zCompute (servers with VM images) for pay-as-you-go use in its datacentres.
Lyve Cloud is – or was – an S3-compatible object-storage-as-a-service product based on Seagate storage located in Equinix datacentres. The hardware is Lyve Drive Racks with Exos AP (5U84) enclosures and MinIO object storage software. Seagate is broadening Lyve Cloud’s service to include Zadara’s zCompute, which can be deployed along with Lyve Cloud Object Storage and provides, Seagate says, significant cost savings.
Ravi Naik, CIO and EVP storage services for Seagate, said “Zadara shares our vision for infrastructure-as-a-service. Vendor lock-in is eliminated, simple, flexible deployment is enabled, and costs become predictable for the largest workloads. We designed Lyve Cloud to help enterprises overcome the cost and complexity of storing, moving and activating data, and collaborating with Zadara helps us to provide our customers with elastic compute resources that scale to their business needs.”
According to Seagate, the inclusion of zCompute in Lyve Cloud provides an equivalent cloud storage and compute experience as other cloud providers. Taken at face value, that would mean AWS, Azure, and GCP, which have a large number of different compute and storage instances. Seagate is somewhat stretching the meaning of “equivalent”.
Nelson Nahum, CEO and co-founder of Zadara, said “As workloads scale larger and larger, the costs to maintain them in public clouds become untenable. Enterprises with petabyte scale workloads have become disheartened by their public cloud experience and want to move to the edge.”
The “edge” in this case is an Equinix colo near the customer. Zadara makes the point that its elastic compute scales down to a single virtual machine “well below the starting price and scale of competing cloud solutions.” The actual x86 server hardware is not being revealed.
AWS is building out a set of local zone edge datacentres that may well compete with these Equinix colos and limit their ability to gain customers.
Zadara’s zCompute is now available on Seagate’s Lyve Cloud with support from Zadara.
