Seagate and Hammerspace are working together to have Seagate’s Lyve Cloud storage-as-a-service (STaaS) and Exos CORVAULT disk box included in Hammerspace’s Global Data Environment (GDE).
The GDE provides access to block, file, and object data across a customer’s edge sites, on-premises datacenters, and the public clouds so that distributed users anywhere in the world can see and access the same overall multi-hybrid cloud data set subject to their access rights. Lyve Cloud is an S3-compatible object storage service based on Seagate Lyve Drive racks with Exos AP (5U84) enclosures and object storage software installed in Equinix wordwide co-location datacenters. Exos CORVAULT is a 1.9PB SAS JBOD (just a box of disks) taking up four rack units.
Seagate business and marketing SVP Jeff Fochtman issued a statement: “Organizations are grappling with capturing, monetizing, and retaining ever-growing mass data sets. Working with Hammerspace, customers can build a data environment spanning across datacenters and Lyve Cloud … based on economic considerations of data movement.”
He made the point that unlike AWS and Azure and GCP, “Lyve Cloud doesn’t charge for ingress or egress of data, making it a perfect complement to the Hammerspace automated data orchestration capabilities.”
Seagate says that Lyve Cloud offers data privacy, high performance, no lock-in, no API charges as well as no egress fees, so lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) for storing, accessing, and moving massive data sets. A deal between Zadara and Seagate means that Lyve Cloud will deploy Zadara zCompute (servers with VM images) for pay-as-you-go use in its datacenters.
This inclusion of zCompute in Lyve Cloud provides, Seagate says, an equivalent cloud storage and compute experience as other cloud providers – meaning, we assume, AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Tony Asaro, Hammerspace’s SVP of Strategy and Business Development, said: “Hammerspace is excited to team with Seagate to bring the advantages of the Global Data Environment platform – orchestrating data to any location – to Seagate users around the globe. With Hammerspace and Lyve Cloud, users gain high-performance, local access to data regardless of where it is located – across the cloud, hybrid cloud, multiple cloud regions or datacenters.”
Comment
It’s good to see a storage hardware supplier taking the public cloud fight to the cloud titans using relationships with third parties for compute (Zadara) and multi-hybrid cloud data access, organization and visibility (Hammerspace).
Where is Seagate going with Lyve Cloud? We know that Zoom meeting recordings can be stored in Lyve Cloud. Seagate is making full and visible use of third parties – unlike AWS, Azure, and GCP which, as far as we know, do everything in-house.
We can see that Seagate wants to get data into its Lyve Cloud STaaS and also encourage customers to buy CORVAULT boxes. Hammerspace similarly wants customers to buy into its vision, and the Lyve Cloud deal will help with that.
Possibly Seagate’s idea is that it can present an affordable AWS-lite alternative public cloud and it’s not seeing this as just another way to ship loads of disk drives into (Equinix) datacenters. We expect Seagate to carry on announcing Lyve Cloud third-party deals as it build out the appeal of its Lyve Cloud, possibly with data protection, databases, and analytics services.
