Enterprise object storage vendor Cloudian has doubled down on its plan to integrate file-based storage and cloud-based applications with the acquisition of Infinity Storage, the Italian technology company behind Cloudian’s HyperFile solution.
Shipped late last year, HyperFile was an integrated NAS controller that added SMB and NFS file services to Cloudian’s HyperStore object storage systems. For media companies, it offered a seamless way for crucial file-based software (like NLEs) to access object storage. By bringing Infinity’s technology in house, Cloudian plans to further develop and streamline the system.
“This clears the way for us to do even tighter integration,” Cloudian CMO Jon Toor told StudioDaily. “Rather than having Infinity’s technology be a separate software product, we’ve done some integration work to bring it into the HyperStore fold. We’re going to continue that work to make it a more tightly integrated, easier to use part of the baseline product.”
The Infinity management team is staying put, Toor said, with Infinity founder Caterina Falchi joining Cloudian as VP of file technologies, and Cloudian intends to staff up at the company’s Milan headquarters. With the acquisition, Cloudian now has offices in San Mateo, CA, Tokyo and Beijing as well as Milan.
“Many production companies still use traditional storage for their media,” Infinity Storage said in a prepared statement. “But now with 4K and 8K video, they’re running into the capacity limits of those older systems, and they’re paying way too much money for that capacity. Now, with HyperFile, there’s an easy way to use Cloudian’s limitlessly scalable, cost-effective storage. HyperFile works just like the storage they have now, so it fits in the workflow. Users can store all the media they want, in their data center where it’s immediately accessible, and save 70% on cost compared with traditional storage.”
Cloud Storage That Speaks the Language of File Systems
Toor said media companies are using object storage as a cost-effecting archival environment, but also as a secondary storage tier for editing platforms that can be accessed by file-based software and also communicate directly with the cloud. “We take data in from Adobe Premiere, and we can just as easily replicate it out to Amazon S3,” Toor said. “We speak the same language to both, so that data can move around wherever you want it.”
Toor sees positive implications for media companies who want to use cloud-based image- or video-recognition toolsets to add enriched metadata to their media libraries, or who could benefit from faster search capabilities on a library contained in a single, consolidated pool of storage. As another example, he cites WGBH in Boston, which is storing file-based Avid data in a Cloudian system that is synchronized with Amazon Glacier for disaster recovery purposes.
“Media companies want to use cloud where it’s most effective,” Toor said. “They are generating and using lots of data, so they have to be smart about how they use cloud to avoid interruptions in their workflow due to data not being available instantly. But we are seeing people using cloud for things like DR and metadata enrichment. You can add a lot of metadata that can be sync’d back to your on-prem work environment, and that combination of using cloud for metadata enhancement and on-prem for rapid access to the media is really powerful.”
