Cloudian sees S3 interest and object storage going mainstream

Object storage, based on Amazon’s S3 – pretty much a de facto standard now – is set to go mainstream.

That’s the view of Cloudian’s co-founder and CEO Michael Tso.

He says it’ll be, “The next NFS”, and is set for widespread enterprise adoption in private cloud deployments.

Why is Tso so confident? He points to validation for Cloudian’s HyperStore S3 software-defined object storage from the likes of Seagate, VMware and Pure Storage.

Cloudian and Seagate joined forces this summer to launch the massively dense exabyte-scale HyperStore Xtreme, with Cloudian storage software and Seagate 16TB drives.

According to Tso, who says Seagate is now shipping more drives for private cloud deployment than for public cloud, the trend towards public cloud is swinging towards on-premises deployments.

For that, Seagate wanted to build its own array/chassis as a vehicle for its 16TB drives and looked to Cloudian to supply the storage intelligence on top.

But why?

Tso says, “When you get to 16TB and are looking forward to 20TB drives they are so tightly packed, so sensitive to airflow, for example, it takes array makers several months to develop chassis that can make use of them.”

“So, it’s essential from the point-of-view of Seagate that they move to shipping entire systems. They have to shrink the time-to-money, to ramp up the volume shipment of their drives with their own chassis. It means a lot of money sooner. And they care about object storage as a predominant way of storing data going forward.”

“They said, ‘We want to be first to market with high density systems and with your software, to be the first shipping 16TB drive systems.’ They want to show what their products can do much more quickly.”

“It brings the market schedule in by three to six months which results in $billions for Seagate.”

So, for Seagate, HyperStore Xtreme is a showcase, a quick route to market, and for Tso the selection of Cloudian is a validation of its product and of S3 object storage for private cloud deployments.

Meanwhile, Tso also points to VMware, with which it also struck a partnership this summer with the launch of Cloudian Object Storage for vCloud Director, which provides S3-compatible storage for the VMware cloud.

Tso says VMware chose Cloudian for object storage collaboration over Dell-EMC object storage products.

“They need a truly software defined system that can run in the cloud and on-prem under a single control panel,” he says. “A native S3 solution – it’s on a path of going from on-prem to public cloud to multi cloud.”

“Where data storage is, is where the VMs will move to,” says Tso.

“Everyone says, ‘I want S3’ and the industry leaders are coming to us,” he adds.

Finally, Tso also points to September’s announcement which saw Cloudian’s HyperStore S3 object storage software integrated with Pure’s CloudSnap to allow data movement between FlashArray and Cloudian.