Cloudian and Seagate Technology teamed up on a new storage product that the partners say provide the public cloud-like storage density and economies of scale to private cloud infrastructures.

It’s called Cloudian HyperStore Xtreme, and it combines Cloudian’s S3-based object storage software with Seagate’s hardware. The product targets enterprises, tier 2 service providers, managed service providers, and colocation facilities.

“This delivers essentially hyperscale technology, hyperscale economics to enterprise storage buyers,” said Jon Toor, chief marketing officer at Cloudian. “It gives them 83% more storage density than our previous devices.” It also boasts 1.5 petabytes (PB) of storage in a 4U height enclosure, which Toor said is “double what some of our competitors are shipping today.” Cloudian’s chief competitors for this product include NetApp and Dell EMC, he added.

Private clouds are now the fastest growing segment of IT hardware infrastructure with spending forecast to increase 58% between 2018 and 2023, according to IDC. A key driver of private cloud adoption is enterprises with large-scale storage needs, which makes this type of on-premises or colocation-based software-defined storage increasingly important, Toor said.

“We are in proof-of-concepts with customers including payment processing services, healthcare, [artificial intelligence-machine learning]-big data applications, media and entertainment — it really spans the gamut,” he said. “Anyone who is consolidating data in a single platform or private cloud quickly runs into the problem of scale, which means you need space, you need money, you need to buy the equipment, and you need to put it somewhere.”

The new storage product provides up to 18 PB in a single data center rack to save floor space, and it costs less than a half cent per gigabyte per month, according to the partners.

“The No. 1 cost in TCO [total cost of ownership] is the floor cost,” said Rags Srinivasan, senior director of marketing and strategy for enterprise systems at Seagate. “By providing such high-density storage — 1.5 petabyte and 4U — is a fantastic way to use floor space.”

And, he added, integrating Cloudian’s storage with Seagate’s compute modules also brings the compute closer to the data to be processed. This opens up use cases at the edge. “We have t-shirts that say ‘the edge is near,’” Srinivasan said. “What is means: [the edge] is near the data sources. You don’t want the data to travel far.”

The partnership with Seagate is the latest in several big moves by Cloudian over the past few months. In April, the company launched a managed service provider provider program so MSPs can offer cloud storage and services such as data management and disaster recovery built on Cloudian’s storage. And just last week it announced a partnership with VMware that will facilitate a native S3-compatible object storage service for more than 4,000 VMware Cloud provider partners.