The firm introduced its flagship product high9stor, a TCO-optimized, scale-out enterprise secondary storage platform designed for backup and archival workloads. Led by CEO Cezary Dubnicki, formerly Head of Storage at NEC Labs Princeton, the company builds on more than 16 years of real-world experience delivering and supporting NEC HYDRAstor, one of the earliest and most scalable global-deduplication backup systems deployed at exabyte scale without data loss.
9LivesData positions high9stor squarely at the intersection of exponential data growth and rising infrastructure costs. The company targets the enterprise secondary storage market, where backup volumes continue to expand while organizations struggle with shrinking backup windows, slow restores, ransomware threats, and escalating total cost of ownership. The central promise of high9stor is to reduce TCO by around 20% today, with a roadmap toward 30% savings, without compromising performance, resiliency, or availability.
high9stor is a software-defined, scale-out backup storage system built on commodity hardware. Using dense 1U nodes with up to 240 TB per rack unit, it scales linearly to roughly 180 nodes and more than 40 PB of raw capacity. Capacity and performance grow together as nodes are added, avoiding the bottlenecks typical of scale-up architectures. The system employs inline global deduplication and compression, significantly reducing stored data volumes while also accelerating backup ingestion.
A core architectural differentiator is the use of distributed, multi-controller algorithms. Background operations such as space reclamation, rebalancing, and integrity checks are executed in parallel across all nodes, rather than by a single controller. This allows high9stor to reclaim capacity in hours instead of weeks, even at very high utilization levels. The platform is designed for non-stop operation, supporting online expansion, hardware refresh, and up to three generations of nodes in a single cluster, eliminating forklift upgrades.
High availability and durability are achieved through erasure coding, allowing the system to tolerate multiple disk or node failures with far lower capacity overhead than traditional replication. Integrated WORM (write-once, read-many) functionality, combined with object lock support and tight integration with leading backup applications, provides strong protection against ransomware and accidental deletion. WAN-optimized, dedup-aware replication enables efficient disaster recovery across sites.
Compatibility with existing backup ecosystems is a key focus. high9stor supports standard interfaces such as NFS, CIFS, and S3, as well as deep integrations with major backup vendors including Cohesity NetBackup (OST), Veeam, Commvault, and Nakivo. This allows enterprises to consolidate multiple backup streams into a single global deduplication pool while preserving application-specific optimizations.
From a business perspective, high9stor is sold as a software subscription priced by raw capacity per month, making costs transparent and predictable. The company targets large enterprises, financial institutions, telecoms, utilities, healthcare, media, and government organizations, with a particular focus on EMEA and Central Asia. Real-world case studies, including large financial institutions operating hundreds of nodes across multiple data centers, underline the platform’s maturity and operational stability.
Overall, 9LivesData presents high9stor as a next-generation backup storage platform that combines proven architectural principles, modern scale-out design, and aggressive TCO optimization—positioning it as a compelling alternative to traditional backup appliances and legacy scale-up systems in an era of relentless data growth.
We'll make some checks at different to measure progress of the team and product on the market in the coming months.
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