New multi-cloud support highlights Cloudian HyperStore 7

Extending their native cloud support to the Google and Microsoft clouds as well as AWS will allow Cloudian partners to add a multi-cloud dimension to their hybrid cloud options for customers.

San Mateo CA-based object storage vendor Cloudian has announced that its HyperStore 7 platform’s cloud capability has been extended with multi-cloud support of the three principal public clouds. Previously, their cloud support was limited to AWS.

“This is data management that now spans both the on-prem and the cloud worlds,” said Jon Toor, Cloudian’s CMO. “We always let you replicate between the data centre and the cloud and also let you search across multiple sites from a single namespace. What is new with HyperStore 7 is that we bring that same capability not into a single cloud, AWS, but across the Google and Microsoft clouds as well. That’s the trick, and it’s a significant one given that the three clouds speak different languages. If you run HyperStore in the cloud, you now have a common language that works across all of them, and have a common framework that works across all of them.”

Cloudian embarked on this integration because of customer demand, given the move of many enterprises towards a multi-cloud strategy.

“Some of our customers wanted to be able to use the various cloud providers interchangeably,” Toor said. “They knew we had very strong S3 capabilities in the Amazon cloud. We have now put that S3 support in both the Google GCP and Microsoft Azure clouds so that they can all talk together.”

Toor emphasized that all this is done natively.

“This is what made this an engineering feat,” he said.  “When we store data in the Google and Microsoft clouds, we store it in the native format of those clouds, and access it in a single shared data pool through a common API. You can use the whole range of S3 tools and applications to work with data in these other clouds. While we worked closely with Google and Microsoft to make this possible, in the end it was our engineering that allowed it.”

Cloudian is emphasizing that the new multi-cloud support significantly extends their core value proposition of combining a scale-out architecture with file and object data types, to create a unified storage environment across both on-prem and cloud deployments.

“This is a fully scale out architecture, which can deploy multiple instances in the cloud to eliminate bottlenecks,” Toor said. The use cases now include cross-cloud data protection, backing up data from Amazon to a different cloud, the ability to use different services in different clouds, and the ability to do cloud bursting by migrating workloads from on-prem to cloud. Our HyperFile integrated NAS Controller, which we introduced in December, will also run with HyperStore 7 in the cloud to create file-based support as well as object. That’s also new.”

Toor said HyperStore 7 is a major win for channel partners.

“It gives them a very simple starting point for cloud in the data centre, from which they can offer new implementation services and new management services,” he said. “They can start with an on-prem deployment in a customer’s data centre, add new services to deploy it in a hybrid cloud environment where it is just a tier, and then later expand it to a multi-cloud environment. It’s a really nice way to build a story over time and add more value-added services.”

Cloudian has always emphasized the flexibility of the HyperStore platform in being available either as an appliance or as software-defined-storage, HyperStore 7 is available in the same options.  The software can be deployed both on-premises and in the cloud, and the appliances range from 48TB to 840TB per device.