snvv - Fotolia
Ctera launches hybrid cloud HC2400M at media use cases
Edge filer specialist hits up the media and entertainment market with its NAS-like hardware that caches data locally, syncs with other nodes and stages data to the cloud
Cloud appliance maker Ctera has launched the largest hybrid cloud hardware node in its range so far, the HC2400M, which scales to 128TB of flash/SAS capacity and is aimed at media and entertainment customers.
Ctera’s HC range are so-called edge filers, which act as local capacity that can sync with other Ctera nodes globally and with cloud storage capacity.
The HC2400M is a response to the needs of media processing customers that require large amounts of storage of unstructured data and for users to be able to collaborate across multiple geographies. It also supports 8K video rendering, and has native support for macOS and Adobe products.
It is intended as a replacement for traditional and some scale-out NAS, and in particular targets increasing use among media processing firms of cloud bursting and collaboration across geographies.
The new node comes in a 6U form factor with 128TB of usable capacity (211TB raw). Disks can be flash or SAS spinning disk, it is accessed as a NAS device with CIFS and NFS protocols and can tier to multiple clouds. It is aimed at use cases where there will be up to 25 video editing staff.
Access can be from desktop and remote/mobile devices via Ctera Drive, APIs/web access and a mobile app, with data held in the Ctera Global File System. From there it can be accessed by users via Ctera instances or auto-synced to S3 cloud storage systems.
Less frequently-used data can be staged off, with stubs retained locally. When these files are called, they are streamed to local Ctera storage. However, users can specify that specific folders are always retained locally if they want.
In case of local outage, filers can fail over to the cloud and restore to a new filer.
The HC2400M is the largest in Ctera’s range of edge filers. The HC400 and HC1200 are both 2U and are aimed at general office use with capacity of 24TB and 64TB in SATA spinning disk and recommended user counts of up to 500 and 3,000 users, respectively.
There is also the hyper-converged XC800/900 appliances that support third-party hypervisors/VMs and come as 2x 2U hardware, and there is the EV virtual appliance edge filer.
Read more on hybrid cloud
- A single environment across on-premise and cloud environments is possible with a new class of product that builds file systems and object stores with hybrid cloud.
- While traditional backup apps evolve to meet the cloud via S3 and Azure, a new breed of backup appliances aims to build a single environment across cloud and on-premise.
