The Hut Group Selects SoftIron Ceph-Based HyperDrive

The Hut Group (THG), a UK multi-product, multi-website online retailer, has selected SoftIron’s HyperDrive as the storage backbone for its global Ingenuity e-commerce platform.

The Hut Group Selects Softiron's Ceph Based Hyperdrive

The company cites SoftIron’s task-specific approach to (open source SDS software) Ceph, as critical determinations for the selection.

SoftIron’s Ceph-optimized storage solution, HyperDrive, tackles mission-critical issues such as scalability, resiliency, and cloud-native flexibility while also excelling in power, performance, and efficiency. The implementation helps the e-commerce giant achieve a resilient, agile infrastructure to power its retail platform while retaining its carbon-neutral certification and avoiding vendor lock-in.

The integration of HyperDrive comes as THG prepares for growth after raising £1.88 billion in itsIPO) in September 2020 – the largest UK IPO on record. With plans to scale globally, THG has built an e-commerce platform called Ingenuity that delivers enterprise scalability and resiliency, is cloud-native, provides superior efficiency and exists within its carbon-neutral eco initiative.

“At THG, part of our success is a result of our bold ambition to do things differently, and by so doing, to create new efficiencies and opportunities that put ourselves and our customers ahead of the curve,” said Schalk Van der Merwe, CTO, THG. “While open source solutions may seem like a ‘science project’ for non-tech companies – for us, being cloud-agnostic, free of lock-in, and achieving Cloud Native Without Cloud, is all strategically important within our architecture. We love the task-specific approach SoftIron is taking to make open-source Ceph deployable and manageable at scale for enterprises like ours, while at the same time creating efficiencies that reduce our environmental footprint.“

Phil Straw, CEO, SoftIron said: “HyperDrive storage appliances are the ultimate productization of Ceph, providing enterprise-grade capabilities in a package that delivers the best of both worlds in raw performance and green efficiency. We’ve engineered HyperDrive storage hardware from the source code and motherboard on up – a method which we call task-specific. We’ve custom-built our hardware to support the source code first and have thus eliminated the inefficiencies that exist using the legacy commodity approach. The result is a powerful storage appliance providing the Swiss Army Knife benefits of Ceph (including the flexibility of universal block, object, and file storage) in a powerful and hyper-efficient package that delivers advantages in both performance and TCO.“

As THG grows and the trend towards more edge infrastructure deployments gains momentum, Schalk and his team will continue to add to their 24 data centers across the UK, Europe, USA, and Asia.

“SoftIron’s solution offers superior management & resilience capabilities without sacrificing efficiency, which perfectly support our short and long term objectives for the business,” he says. “We’re already operational with HyperDrive in the UK, Germany and the US and look forward to working together to deliver a new class of service and support for our customers across the globe.“