9LivesData provides enhanced, modernised products for Western markets. (Image source: 123RF)
9LivesData, the Warsaw-based engineering company behind the secondary storage technology originally commercialised by NEC as HYDRAstor, today announced the appointment of Data Sciences Corporation as its distributor for the high9stor product line across southern Africa.
Under the agreement, Data Sciences Corporation will lead go-to-market, channel enablement and post-sales support for high9stor – including the new H9S-100 platform – giving regional enterprises, service providers and government customers a direct path to a software-defined backup and archive storage system engineered for very low total cost of ownership.
9LivesData was founded by Cezary Dubnicki, who led the architecture and algorithm design of HYDRAstor at NEC's Princeton research labs before returning to Poland to productise the technology. HYDRAstor became one of the first commercial scale-out secondary storage systems with global deduplication, deploying thousands of nodes and exabytes of capacity across enterprise and government worldwide. With NEC focusing the original HYDRAstor business on the Japanese market, 9LivesData provides new, enhanced and modernised products for Western markets.
The H9S-100 is a software-defined system that runs on high-density 1U servers with 12 × 20TB drives (240TB per node), scaling to 180 nodes and 43PB of raw capacity in a single global pool. It speaks NFS, CIFS and S3, supports mixed-generation hardware in the same grid, sustains storage utilisation of up to 95% and introduces a Cold Tier for archive workloads – typically delivering around 20% lower TCO than competing backup storage solutions.
Warren Hulley, International Business Executive of Data Sciences and Cezary Dubnicki, Founder of 9LivesData.
“Data Sciences Corporation and 9LivesData have a long, shared history through the NEC HYDRAstor years, and that trust is exactly why we're stepping up as a strategic distributor for this region,” said Warren Hulley, International Business Executive of Data Sciences. “The H9S-100 is a genuinely modernised platform – denser, more power-efficient and far more scalable than what came before, while still talking the protocols our customers actually use: NFS, CIFS, S3 and OST. The new Cold Tier is a game-changer for clients managing long-retention and archive data, because they get the economics of cold storage without giving up the single-pool simplicity of high9stor. For Africa and the Gulf States, this gives us a credible, software-defined answer to runaway backup costs and to the ransomware and resilience pressures every CIO is facing.”
“We built high9stor so that existing HYDRAstor customers never have to be stranded by a shift in vendor strategy, and so that new customers get a software-defined system designed for Western expectations on flexibility and cost,” said Cezary Dubnicki, Founder of 9LivesData. “Data Sciences Corporation has the engineering depth and the customer relationships across Africa and the Gulf States to take this to market properly. We're committed to backing them – and their customers – for the long term.”
Data Sciences Corporation will appoint additional channel partners across neighbouring countries with regional support delivered through Support Now, an infrastructure-based service organisation selected by Data Sciences, which will provide installation, commissioning and field services to resellers and their customers on a 24/7 basis, both remotely and on-site.
Roadmap items already in flight include up to a 50% reduction in power consumption for existing systems, client-side S3 deduplication, a dedicated archive variant certified with additional backup and archiving applications, and a next-generation platform built on QLC NVMe SSDs that targets much higher density and performance at HDD-class TCO.
