HC2 PE

Our initial product HC2 Preservation Edition (HC2 PE) targets Private Cloud Storage customers who want to preserve large amounts of data. HC2 PE is by far the industry’s best storage solution for preservation archival especially long-term preservation.

Organizations ranging from digital libraries, life science institutions, photo sites, film studios, HADOOP users, governments, law firms, mapping organizations etc. are generating more and more digital data every year. In fact, according to SNIA, 68% of customers surveyed indicated they need 100-year archives. These organizations need to preserve a huge tsunami of new data. Preservation archival is different from compliance archival, a commonplace practice in enterprises, in its objective (access not compliance), amount of data (much larger data-sets) and longevity of data (much longer periods).

Preservation requires the ability to store lots of data cheaply and reliably. Specifically:

HC2 PE meets these requirements. Each of these requirements is addressed in more detail.

Reduction in total cost of ownership
HC2 PE has a rich set of features to reduce the cost of every phase of the storage systems’ life-cycle. See figure below.

Data Guarantees
HC2 PE provides the data guarantees required by this use-case as per the table below.

  • Erasure Coding & Self Healing
  • Provides reliability e.g. availability with 2 nodes lost out of 16
  • Very high mean-time-to-data-loss (MTTDL)
  • Seamless migration from old servers to new ensures data longevity
  • Open Source
  • Companies come and go, projects come and go; open-source ensures continued code development: TierraCloud is an example
  • Fixed content with integrity checks
  • Architecture ensures immutable data
  • Hashes on data chunks combined with background integrity checks (data doctor) ensure data integrity
  • Meta-data
  • Meta-data can be used to make the data self-describing ensuring that the data is still usable over time
  • Metadata may also be used to store digital signatures for the object

Scalability
The underlying technology was purpose-built for scalability. The architectural foundations of a fully distributed design with no single master and a multi-cell architecture ensure extreme scalability to petabyte and exabyte scale.

Detailed Specifications for HC2 PE, Release Name “Replevin”