Seagate: Lyve Cloud Review

As more enterprises attempt to take advantage of the potential cost savings of the cloud, some have been disappointed. The largest data producers sometimes find their cloud storage costs to be less predictable and higher than anticipated.

Seagate’s Lyve Cloud solution provides a single storage location to ingest and store all data in an organization with fully predictable costs. Suitable for use as a data lake, Lyve Cloud storage provides transparent pricing, no egress fees, and no API connection fees to provide more predictable costs for its customers’ data storage.

See below to learn all about Seagate Lyve Cloud and where it stands in the storage sector:

Seagate Lyve Cloud and the object storage market

Seagate’s Lyve Cloud solution is a relatively new entrant into the cloud object storage market that Market Research Future estimates will reach $15.3 billion by the end of 2030 and currently growing at 13.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

Competitors in this market consist of various manufacturers: including AWS; Dell Technologies; Google Cloud; Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE); Hitachi Vantara; IBM; and NetApp.

Seagate forecast the market opportunity for Lyve products and services to reach $50 billion by 2025. This seems closer to more aggressive estimates available for the software-defined storage (SDS) market.

Markets and Markets forecasted a 2016 revenue of $4.72 billion for the software-defined storage market that would reach $22.56 billion by 2021 thanks to a CAGR of 36.7%. The market missed those projections, and Maximize Market Research subsequently estimates total market revenue of $12.92 billion in 2021 with 25.8% CAGR resulting in $51.21 billion by 2027.

The competitors in the software-defined storage market includes: Citrix; Dell Technologies; FalconStor Software; Fujitsu; HPE; IBM; Microsoft; NetApp; OpenText; Oracle; StarWind Software; and VMware.

Seagate Lyve Cloud key features

• Storage designed for cross-cloud flexibility and data use
• S3 compatible application integration
• Connects to cloud repositories
• Fully managed migration services
• High data resiliency — 99.99% available
• Compliance-ready
  • Optional object immutability prevents accidental changes or deletion
  • Specify data retention by S3 bucket
  • Audit logs track user activity for reporting
• Accredited and robust security
  • ISO 27001:2013 certified
  • SOC2 certified
  • TLS 1.2 with 256-bit data encryption for data in motion
  • 256-bit SSE-C and SSE-S3 encryption for data at rest
  • Detailed audit logs available
  • Multiple identity and access management standards supported
  • Object immutability defends against ransomware
• Optional multi-site replication available

Seagate Lyve Cloud key benefits

Customers that select a solution such as Seagate Lyve Cloud do so to obtain the following key benefits.

Multicloud compatibility

Compatible with multiple public clouds, Seagate’s Lyve cloud also integrates with private cloud environments and provides an enormous storage solution without silos or cloud vendor lock-in.

Reliable availability

All data is protected by a 99.99% availability guarantee and can be further protected by enabling data immutability options. Lyve Cloud enables customers to access data from anywhere and will reliably be available.

Stores everything

Seagate Lyve Cloud can store all data types and ingest from a huge variety of sources. Customers can transition legacy data from off-line archival or cold storage to Lyve Data and enhance its value to the organization.

Seagate Lyve Cloud use cases

CyArk

CyArk seeks to preserve the history of the world’s cultures by creating LIDAR 3D laser-scanned images of historical monuments worldwide, such as Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy, or Chichen Itza in Peru. During the COVID-19 pandemic, its centralized server and library of portable hard drives in its headquarters became a choke point for analysis and further progress with their mission.

CyArk used Lyve Mobile to send data quickly to Lyve Cloud and transform its clunky on-premises server into a flexible and responsive cloud solution.

“Providing stable access to our entire data library all in one place is huge — we can organize our data once instead of having to replicate it two or three times,” declared Josn Ristevski, CEO of Cyark. “We have full control to manage all our data, who has access to it, who can read and write, so every team has what it needs. Lyve Cloud also makes it much simpler to share our files with external research and educational partners for the common good.”

The Sauber Group

The Sauber Group manages Alfa Romeo’s F1 Team, ORLEN, and provides advanced engineering and prototype development services. In efforts to improve performance, Sauber engineers created innovative wind tunnel tests, but the flood of sensor data continuously caused storage management problems and Sauber could not predict its storage costs.

When the Sauber Group went to scale up its testing, it adopted Seagate’s Lyve Cloud to store, access, and move the unstructured data at scale and to achieve predictable costs.

“Seagate Lyve Cloud gives our team the freedom to focus our resources, time, and attention on what we do best—delivering results on track.” said Frédéric Vasseur, team principal of Alfa Romeo F1 Team ORLEN.

Seagate

Before deploying Lyve Cloud to customers, Seagate first developed the solution to solve its own internal problems. Each hard drive manufacturing plant generated enormous data that could not be used or analyzed with legacy solutions.

“[Seagate was] generating over 30 terabytes of data in our global factories on a daily basis, and we store all of this data locally within each site,” explained Ravi Naik, CIO and EVP of storage services at Seagate. “There is no way to really bring that data together and to correlate it.

“That’s where the valuable intelligence of the data is lost. So, we were faced with a problem where we wanted to bring all of the data together, but the existing technologies and bandwidth challenges prevented us from doing that.”

Seagate created Lyve Cloud to consolidate the data into a common repository that was cost prohibitive if it was simply dumped in a public cloud. Moving the data to Lyve Cloud saves the company $200,000 per month in backup storage costs company-wide, and now, the data is available worldwide for multiple internal purposes.

Seagate Lyve Cloud differentiators

Customers that select Lyve Cloud do so because of the following key differentiators.

Fully managed migration services

Many storage providers allow for self service, but Seagate goes one step further and offers fully managed migration services. Customer’s don’t have to figure out how to manage uploads with their limited connectivity bandwidth. Seagate will provide Lyve Mobile storage units which can be shipped back to Seagate, where it will then upload the data directly to the client’s Lyve Cloud.

Predictable total cost of ownership 

Seagate does not charge fees for egress or API calls to provide customers with lower costs and predictable monthly billing. Seagate also provides several cost calculators to assist in cost estimation prior to entering into any contracts.

This is especially valuable for companies with a huge amount of data that isn’t frequently used and that might be stored in cold storage on the cloud. When accessed, cold storage cloud data can generate higher fees than other storage options. Lyve Cloud provides one low price for all data which provides predictable pricing and allows companies to use their entire dataset for analysis, AI training, and forecasting.

Brand reputation

For more than 40 years Seagate hard drives and other storage products provided value to IT managers all around the world. Seagate’s data storage innovation track record and decades of dependability make it a brand many businesses will trust for their storage needs.

Seagate Lyve Cloud pricing

Seagate provides a set of three total cost of ownership (TCO) calculators to estimate costs using Lyve Cloud. Each calculator generates a cost based on specific variables and then estimates typical savings against cloud competitors.

• Data Repository TCO Variables:
  • Initial Data Transfer (in TB)
  • New Data Added Monthly (in TB)
  • Data Retention Period in Months (1 to 120)
  • Data Lifetime/Usage in Months (1 to 240)
  • Object Storage Chunk Size (in MB)
  • Data Deletion Within First 90 Days of Archive (in TB)
  • Frequency of Access (Workload, Nearline, Archive)
  • Data Changes per Month (in TB)
  • Data Downloaded or Read per Month (in TB)
• Backup Storage TCO Variables:
  • Initial Full Backup Size (in TB)
  • Backup Retention Period in Months (1 to 120)
  • % of Data Growth per Year
  • Object Storage Chunk Size (in MB)
  • % of Data Changing per Day
  • Recovery Points per Day
  • Frequency of Access (Workload, Nearline, Archive)
  • % of Data Downloaded or Restored per Month
• Data Migration TCO Variables:
  • Storage Technology Category (Tape, 7 Track, 9 Track, DVD, CD, MO)
  • Storage Technology (depends upon selection of Category, many options)
  • Number of Media
  • Work Hours per Day
  • Number of Media Readers Available
  • Reserved Internet Transfer Bandwidth in Mbps

In addition to cost and savings, the Data Migration TCO will also show days saved by using Seagate Lyve Cloud.

Additionally, Seagate’s cloud storage does not charge for data retrieval, data ingestion, read/write operations, archive retrieval, expedited data access and retrieval, data egress, API calls, anytime data deletion, and expert support.

Conclusions

Enterprises with huge data needs benefit from scalable cloud solutions. Those with especially huge datasets and multiple cloud environments may benefit even more from a switch to the predictable costs and wide compatibility of Seagate’s Lyve Cloud.

Lyve Cloud’s flat pricing without access costs targets organizations with large datasets and a need to access their entire data pool without additional fees. Any organization that fits that profile should evaluate Lyve Cloud as a candidate solution for their needs.