Ovation claps together private cloud storage service with HGST, Versity basis

An Ovation Data Services private storage cloud for media and entertainment and oil and gas industries is based on HGST's Active Archive System and Versity Storage Manager.

We wrote about the Versity Storage Manager system in June, saying it was an archiving package with an S3 interface to a backend store. This store could be a public cloud or on-premises object storage and we thought the latter could be Cloudian object storage.

The Versity software is used by up to 20 customers, one of whom is Ovation Data Services. Western Digital's HGST unit tells us that its Active Archive System array is the backend store for Versity (and thus Ovation), not Cloudian.

HGST says its archive product enables suppliers like Ovation to offer "multi-tenant storage-as-a-service environments that easily and transparently integrate with existing POSIX applications and can scale to hundreds of petabytes (PB)."

WD has got to be one of the most vertically integrated storage hardware suppliers out there, taking in silicon and multiple chemicals at one end of its operation, building chips, platters and heads, and then disks and SSDs, and storage arrays, adding in software en route as well. Just how far it can push its storage array product technology is an interesting question. ®