Cloudian's HyperStore object storage platform is now certified AWS Outposts Ready, giving customers a local storage target for Outposts S3 data that scales more cheaply.
The recently earned certification allows customers to point their Outposts S3 data to on-premises object storage. This provides more cost-effective storage than buying more Outposts volumes -- up to 70% in cost savings, according to Cloudian.
Cloudian HyperStore starts at three nodes in a limitless cluster, and nodes can be added as either preconfigured appliances ranging from 48 TB to 1.5 petabytes or as software-defined storage. AWS Outposts S3 storage is sold in 26 TB, 48 TB and 96 TB units.
Furthermore, having the data stored locally alongside Outposts may help customers fulfill data sovereignty and compliance requirements. Cloudian HyperStore is integrated with Amazon S3's Object Lock capability to provide immutable storage, supporting data governance and legal hold use cases.
On-prem and cloud infrastructures are two sides of the same coin. The more commonality you have between the two, the easier it is for you to put data in the right place.
Jon ToorChief marketing officer, Cloudian
Cloudian HyperStore has built-in Amazon S3 API compatibility, making it ideal for hybrid infrastructure, said Jon Toor, chief marketing officer at Cloudian. Most organizations have or want to have both on-prem and cloud components, and Cloudian provides a single management and monitoring interface for storage across both types of environments.
"On-prem and cloud infrastructures are two sides of the same coin. The more commonality you have between the two, the easier it is for you to put data in the right place," Toor said.
IT teams are looking for that unification, and there's real value in having applications written for the cloud run the same way on-premises, Toor added.
The Outposts Ready certification means Cloudian HyperStore appears like any other S3 storage environment to AWS Outposts. Since Cloudian HyperStore can scale to exabytes, it opens up new use cases for Outposts, Toor said. Medical imaging, big data analytics, AI and machine learning all require massive storage capacity. With Cloudian providing that storage, it becomes financially feasible for organizations to deploy those applications on-prem, provided they are S3-compatible.
Cloudian environments can scale to petabytes, and its dashboard helps customers keep tabs on all of it.
AWS Outposts is an Amazon-managed service that deploys AWS infrastructure to a customer's data center or colocation facility, delivering AWS services and APIs with an on-premises presence. Typically, AWS Outposts customers require their applications and data to remain local for security, compliance and control reasons but desire AWS's services delivery method, said Randy Kerns, senior strategist and analyst at Evaluator Group.
Many customers need a large content repository alongside the applications they're running in AWS, and the scale and cost of Cloudian object storage make it more advantageous to use than AWS Outposts' storage offerings, Kerns said. Backup, financial, research and analytic data all take up a lot of space and need somewhere to live, he added.
According to its site, Amazon has 64 technology products with the AWS Outposts Ready certification. The list includes products from storage vendors such as Pure Storage, Infinidat and NetApp. Cloudian is the only object storage software product listed.
There are enough businesses adopting AWS Outposts that it's become yet another environment storage vendors will have to support, Kerns said.
"The certification is a necessary item for many customers, so vendors will want to invest in the time and effort to achieve this," Kerns said.
