Cloudian recently announced an addition to their HyperStore appliance. I had the opportunity to be briefed by Jon Toor and thought I’d share the highlights of the announcement here. I’ve had the pleasure of talking to Cloudian at a few Storage Field Day events. If you’re unfamiliar with the HyperStore 4000, you can read my coverage of it here. In short, it’s 840TB of object storage in 4RU with really, really, comprehensive S3 compliance, amongst other things.

HyperFile You Say?

HyperFile is the new file front-end controller for the HyperStore appliance. It supports the following features:

• SMB3 and NFS3;
• High Availabilty with active / passive controllers;
• Non-disruptive failover;
• POSIX compliance;
• Active Direcotry / LDAP authentication;
• Write Once Read Many (WORM); and
• Snapshots.

It wouldn’t be a product announcement without a bezel shot. I can’t say whether this is actually what it looks like, but if it does, it’s kind of cool.

[image courtesy of Cloudian]

The appliance itself is 2RU with dual controllers and a shared backplane. The cool thing is that it can be deployed as VMs, making it appealing for service providers looking to setup multiple environments for customers. Supported hypervisors include vSphere 5.1 (or later) and KVM. Replication is handled at the HyperStore level.

Multi-tenancy is supported with dedicated controllers.

[image courtesy of Cloudian]

There’s a global namespace between file and object and it also supports a shared namespace across multiple NAS controllers, meaning you can up your number of controllers to increase bandwidth or replication performance. From a scalability perspective, it supports up to 64 namespaces per controller. One of my favourite features is what Cloudian call “converged access” between file and object, meaning you could use S3 for storing files. It also supports Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon S3 formats, opening up some interesting possibilities for file consumption on-premises and in the cloud.

There are two editions available. The Basic HyperFile NAS Controller includes

• Full protocol support;
• High-availability;
• Converged data access; and
• Data migration.

The Enterprise HyperFile NAS Controller adds

• Snapshot;
• WORM; and
• Geo-distribution with file versioning/locking.

Thoughts

I’ve been a fan of Cloudian’s products for some time, and this addition to the HyperStore platform makes them a compelling option for file and object storage in the data centre. With this approach they’re looking to push further into Media Asset Management (MAM) and video surveillance solutions. The title of the post is misleading. Object is already pretty cool, and a very suitable solution for a number of workloads. So why would an object vendor need to add file to work in these industries? Isn’t object ideally suited to these kinds of workloads? Yes, but sometimes the leading software vendors and people in charge of workflows are focused on other things, like only supporting file. So Cloudian have adapted to take a bigger piece of the pie. In much the same way that some data protection solutions are still file oriented, the HyperFile allows Cloudian to play in areas where it’s traditionally been excluded.

I’m also a fan of the appliance as VM approach and I like the breadth of protocol support and cloud integration available. If you’re going to put cloud in the name of your company the expectation will be there that you know what you’re doing. Cloudian haven’t disappointed thus far. If you’re in the market for a solid object (and now file) solution, you could do worse than talking to the folks at Cloudian.