Seagate Technology has moved to substantially reduce the total cost of cloud storage with the launch of a Lyve Cloud service that supports the same de facto S3 application programming interface (API) employed by other cloud service providers.
As one of the largest providers of drives to both cloud storage providers and manufacturers, Seagate has been somewhat circumspect when it comes to potentially competing against IT vendors that are among its biggest customers. The long-time manufacturer of magnetic and solid-state drives (SSDs) is now putting aside that timidity to unfurl a cloud storage service that in addition to being as accessible as any other cloud storage service, has reduced costs by eliminating egress fees.
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Lyve Cloud’s Proposition
Cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) make it relatively inexpensive to store data. However, when an IT organization seeks to move that data to another platform the fees that are applied by cloud service providers border on the exorbitant.
Seagate is carefully positioning its cloud service. The Lyve Cloud service is intended to be complementary to offerings provided by other cloud service providers and on-premises platforms provided by storage system vendors, said Rags Srinivasan, senior director of global marketing for Seagate.
Seagate is primarily focused on secondary data that is typically stored via a backup and recovery platform. As part of the launch of Lyve Cloud Seagate has enlisted support from Commvault, which will integrate its data protection platforms with the Seagate cloud service.
Lyve Cloud provides always-on encryption for data in motion and at rest and is already ISO27001 and SOC2 certified. The goal is to make data stored in an object-based storage system readily accessible to a wide range of other applications that don’t need to access data in milliseconds, said Srinivasan. The use cases involving Lyve Cloud will ultimately span exabytes of data.
“The market is so huge,” said Srinivasan. “It’s not about displacement.”
Seagate has partnered with Equinix to provide access to its cloud storage service via a network of existing data centers in the U.S. to minimize overall latency. The plan is to eventually expand the reach of the Lyve Cloud service around the globe.
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Seagate’s Opening Gambit
It’s not likely Seagate will usurp AWS. Microsoft and Google as the dominant provider of cloud storage services any time soon. However, the mere existence of Lyve Cloud will act, at the very least, as governor on cloud storage services that tend to have a lot of costs hidden in the terms of conditions of a service agreement.
In the meantime, IT teams would be well advised to reevaluate what type of data needs to be stored in the cloud at what total cost. As more organizations start to routinely store petabytes of data in the cloud to, for example, train artificial intelligence (AI) models. In fact, lower cloud storage costs will play a critical role in eventually democratizing AI to the point that it becomes affordable for a wider swath of organizations to employ.
Whatever the motivation for storing data in the cloud, however, the most important thing organizations should remember is it’s their data. Any cloud service provider that makes it costly to reuse that data on another platform using what amounts to an exit fee may not always be putting the best interest of the customer first.
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