Nine years after HYDRAstor became one of the first commercial scale-out secondary storage platforms with global deduplication, the engineering team that built it has found a new channel partner for the technology's next chapter. 9LivesData, a Warsaw-based storage company founded by Cezary Dubnicki, who led architecture and algorithm design for HYDRAstor at NEC's Princeton research labs, has appointed Data Sciences Corporation as its distributor for the high9stor product line across southern Africa.
Dubnicki returned to Poland to commercialize the technology after NEC redirected HYDRAstor development toward the Japanese market, leaving enterprise and government customers in Western markets without a clear upgrade path. 9LivesData was established to fill that gap, offering new hardware and software for organizations that had deployed HYDRAstor at scale and for customers evaluating software-defined secondary storage for the first time.
The H9S-100, the current flagship platform, runs on 1U servers loaded with 12 drives of 20TB each, delivering 240TB of raw capacity per node. A single global pool scales to 180 nodes and 43PB of raw capacity, with storage utilization running up to 95%. The system supports NFS, CIFS, S3 and OST protocols, accepts mixed-generation hardware within the same grid, and ships with a Cold Tier designed for long-retention archive workloads. 9LivesData puts its TCO advantage at roughly 20% below competing backup storage products.
Warren Hulley, International Business Executive at Data Sciences Corporation, described the appointment as an extension of a relationship built during the HYDRAstor years:
"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. 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."
Under the distribution agreement, first reported by IT Web Africa, Data Sciences will recruit additional channel partners across neighboring countries. Field installation, commissioning and ongoing support will run through Support Now, an infrastructure services organization selected by Data Sciences to provide 24/7 remote and on-site coverage to resellers and their customers.
Dubnicki connected the channel decision to a commitment that predates the HYDRAstor handover:
"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. 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."
Development already under way includes a reduction of up to 50% in power consumption for existing systems, client-side S3 deduplication, an archive-specific variant certified with additional backup applications, and a next-generation platform built on QLC NVMe SSDs targeting higher density and performance at storage costs comparable to current hard drive deployments.
