Cloudian upgrade brings hybrid cloud file and object storage

Cloudian has announced an upgrade to its Hyperstore product which brings true Hybrid cloud operations across the company’s storage environment.

Hyperstore version 7 allows the object storage platform to operate in Microsoft, Amazon and Google cloud environments with full data portability between them.

That means customers can deploy Cloudian on site and in any of those three cloud platforms with access via Amazon S3 or via Cloudian’s Hyperfile, which allows file level access.

This enables a single data pool that can run across geographies and is searchable on-premise and in the cloud with data portable between them, said Cloudian CMO Jon Toor.

“It provides an S3 interface into Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure,” he said. “This is critical because if you want the clouds to work together, you have to have a common layer. That doesn’t exist today. Now you can replicate, migrate between clouds.”

Cloudian object storage is based on the Apache Cassandra open source distributed database. It can come as storage software that customers deploy on commodity hardware, in cloud software format or in hardware appliance form.

Hyperstore S3 object storage can also operate on-premise, in the cloud and between the two. Hyperfile file access – which is Posix/Windows compliant – can also be deployed on-premise and in the cloud to provide file access.

Key use cases expected by Cloudian include cross-cloud replication in situations that allow for use of multiple cloud providers, said Toor.

“It was hard to go from Azure to AWS, for example,” he said. “It means you can now use different services from different clouds.

“You might have departments that like the analytics on Google and the AI on Amazon, but you can’t rein them in when they want to use them because it’s only a credit card away. So you get a single namespace with unified access controls across all clouds.”

A key selling point for Cloudian is that data in the various clouds is stored in that cloud’s native format.

“That means data is accessible to apps running in those clouds,” said Toor. “If data was stored in our own format in the cloud, they wouldn’t be accessible in that way. That’s the secret sauce to true cloud-on-prem interchangeability. With others, there are catches – that you can store data in the cloud but can’t use it from there, or you can’t move it between clouds.”