Analysis. Decentralized storage and compute startup Cubbit is working with CTERA to provide backend storage, and it needs regrading from a niche Web3 storage supplier to an enterprise-grade storage company.

Italy-basedCubbit’s DS3 storage is built on it offering a single virtual storage pool that is actually composed of myriad individual physical data stores, a swarm, located in different places and provided by its partners. Cubbit’s metadata and software tracks and organizes these physical stores into single virtual islands of capacity for its customers that are more cost-efficient than mainstream public cloud storage. CTERA offers file services distributed across many sites in a customer’s organization and founded on a central, S3-compatible object storage facility which can be located in the public cloud or the customer’s own data centre using third-party storage.

Put CTERA and Cubbit together and you have distributed file services based on a decentralized and geo-distributed S3-compatible object foundation.

Enrico Signoretti.

Enrico Signoretti, Cubbit’s VP for Product and Partnerships, told us in a briefing: “We partner with CTERA for high-end customers. We have several projects with them. … We go to the customer together and we sell the S3 as a backend of CTERA. It’s a very simple proposition.”

Cubbit is, effectively, a storage platform underneath CTERA’s software layer.

Signoretti reckons: “CTERA is a very good partner for us because they provide a very high-end solution, highly secure, … and it’s easy for us to position the product.”

This is interesting because CTERA partner won’t partner with just anybody, it has its reputation to consider, and yet it sees Cubbit as a reliable partner.

Overall, Cubbit has more than 400 enterprise customers and has raised around $25 million from international investors. DS3 stands for Distributed S3, and it stores a file as separate and redundant chunks spread across a selection of its physical locations. It suggests this is similar to RAID, but for data centers, and it offers up to 15 nines of durability; that’s 99.9999999999999 percent. Its software is available two ways. DS3 Cloud is fully-managed cloud object storage available from partners, while DS3 Composer is software-defined object storage for large enterprises and service providers; think WIIT. Customers build their own virtual private clouds.

Up until now we have considered decentralized or Web3 storage to be a niche sideline to mainstream storage, with customers being consumers and small businesses looking for cheaper-than-Amazon cloud storage. Suppliers such as StoreJ and Cubbit were written about from this point of view. StorJ has just been bought by a private equity business, Inveniam and will be used inside its private markets business.

Cubbit is benefitting from the need for sovereign data stores; it is based in Italy, part of the EU which has a focus on data privacy. It has also moved up market to medium and and larger business, such as Italy’s ASL CN1 Cuneo and Planetek.

It’s clear that CTERA is now an enterprise supplier, and it’s time to re-evaluate Cubbit and think of it as another mainstream storage supplier, and not a Web3, blockchain oddity.

That means we need to be aware of how it functions as a producer of distributed storage software, what services it offers on top of its storage base layer, and how it might respond to AI storage needs. These are points which we will using when we hear of Cubbit developments in the future.