Hightail buddies up with Cleversafe

File sync 'n' sharer Hightail has hightailed it from DDN to object storage supplier Cleversafe after facing a dramatic cost hike.

The company started out as YouSendIt in 2004, enabling users to bypass email restraints on sending large files. It then moved on in 2012 to being a file-sharing site for enterprises, competing against Box and Dropbox and is making progress.

It has more than 45 million users registered across 200 countries. Half a million customers pay for its services while the rest use a free service with a 2GB limit. The company is private and has raised around $100m in funding in five or more rounds, renaming itself Hightail last year.

Back in 2011 it decided to use DataDirect's GRIDScaler parallel file system and SFA10K-X hardware for its file storage.

At that point it had 20 million registered users and had a 60 - 70 per cent annual growth rate. This meant it continually had to buy more storage, so the company chose DDN as its partner because DDN's technology could scale, had a smaller data centre footprint than alternate suppliers, and cost 20 - 40 per cent less.

Roll forward to November 2014 and Hightail has chosen to use Cleversafe's object storage, dsNet for its file storage.

Its storage needs are growing at a fantastic rate, more than 1PB/month, and an insider claimed cost of buying capacity from its previous supplier was increasing dramatically in price. It needed to bring these costs under control and looked elsewhere.

Rob Ruth, IT operations veep at Hightail, quoted in a Cleversafe press release, said Cleversafe is "four to five times less expensive than our previous provider.”

That is dramatic, and shows the benefit of using commodity storage components rather than a proprietary array.

Other benefits include a 50 per cent cut in storage admin time and a 30 per cent lowering of storage array power consumption. As expected, Cleversafe's dsNet can scale with Hightail's needs and has security features like encryption to meet the requirements of customers in regulated and security-conscious environments.

At hyperscale, in the tens of petabytes area and beyond, smallish $/GB differences become massive $/PB differences. That can completely alter a customer's view of suppliers, bringing cost very much to the fore in buying decisions. In fact, can costly proprietary arrays sell at all against equivalent or near-equivalent commodity hardware-based alternatives as the capacity needed goes up and up? ®