I’ve written about Cloudian before, having had the good fortune of seeing them present at Storage Field Day 7 and Storage Field Day 10. I recently had the opportunity to be briefed by Jon Toor, Cloudian’s CMO, on the HyperStore 4000 (the datasheet can be found here and Cloudian’s press release can be found here).

Super Dense Spec

[image via Cloudian]

The HyperStore 4000 comes with two nodes per chassis, each with 2 Intel E5-2620 v4, 8 core CPUs and 128GB RAM. There are 35 hot-swap 3.5″ drives per node, with 2 800GB hot-swap SSDs per node and 10GbE networking (same as the HyperStore 1500).

With raw capacity of 700TB in a 4RU enclosure, Cloudian tell me the HyperStore 4000 reduces storage costs by 40 percent versus their previous solutions.

It also offers:

• Data availability is enhanced by the resilient hardware architecture (two compute nodes per chassis), delivering 99.999999 percent data durability from a three-appliance cluster; and
• Built-in hybrid cloud tiering (to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud) enables customers to optimize their storage model with a combination of on-premises Cloudian storage and public cloud storage.

Thoughts

I’ve written about Cloudian’s S3 guarantee before – and this is still a big part of the value proposition. I spoke to Jon about where he saw uptake in Cloudian (and object storage in general) in the enterprise. He talked about data protection on-premises being the obvious problem being solved with object and spoke of object storage cost approaching the same economics as tape. But there’s other stuff you can use object storage for too, including media asset managers (using S3 compliance) and video surveillance. Most of the software on the market has some kind of hook into S3, and this is heavily leveraged by Cloudian to provide the same services on-premises.

But object storage (and Cloudian in particular) is not just about cheap and deep. Object does distributed storage really well too. Jon spoke about Cloudian providing good, verifiable visibility into data locality. This can be extremely important for government authorities and businesses with a requirement to focus not just on how their data is stored, but also where.

If you’re in the market for some nice, dense, smart object storage, I’d encourage you to look further into the Cloudian offering. For another perspective on the HyperStore 4000 announcement, El Reg has a good summary here.