Company Profile: 9LivesData
The developer of NEC HYDRAstor continues compatibility with its new product High9Stor
By Philippe Nicolas | December 23, 2025 at 2:02 pmCompany name:
9LivesData Prosta Spółka Akcyjna
HQ and offices:
HQ and office: ul. Dominikańska 25, 02-738 Warsaw Poland
Website:
9livesdata.com
Date founded:
2008
Founders:
Cezary Dubnicki, Owner and founder
LinkedIn profile
PhD in CS, 25+ years’ experience in storage industry, researcher at Princeton University, Senior Director in Storage Networks, Department Head in NEC Labs Princeton, NJ, founded 9LivesData in 2008.
77 publications, 5700+ citations according to Google Scholar.
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Financial funding:
$6 million
Employees numbers:
30
Revenue:
2024 –18 M PLN, which is about $5 million at the current exchange rates
Technology:
The company has unique 16+ years of experience in designing, implementing and supporting world-wide six generations of HYDRAstor scale-out backup storage – work done on contract for the Japanese IT giant NEC. Based on these experiences we designed and implemented the high9stor with the following technologies:
- Scale-out architecture based on a distributed hash table
- In-line variable-block global deduplication
- On-line data deletion of content addressable storage with global dedup
- Client-side deduplication
- Erasure coding
- Global load balancing
- Dedup-aware replication
- Tiering to cloud
- Intelligent caching layer – SSD/NVMe chache for data acceleration
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Products:
high9stor – scale-out software-defined backup storage with global in-line deduplication. The system currently scales up to 180 nodes and 43 PB raw using 1u Supermicro nodes with 12×20 TB SATA drives resulting in very high 240 TB/u storage density. With dedup on a client backup speed can achieve even 72 PB/h/node; and on restores all disks are used.
The system provides one repository to keep all enterprise backups written with standard interfaces like NFS, CIFS and S3 as well as specialized interfaces like NetBackup OST. All major backup applications are supported, many with features like full backup synthesis, WORM ransomware protection and dedup-aware replication for disaster recovery.
Nodes can be added and removed on-line ensuring non-stop operation and avoiding fork-lift upgrades.
Performance and capacity bottlenecks are avoided due to scale-out architecture sharing system resources among all backup applications using the system.
Low TCO is ensured with high storage density, very efficient storage usage due to global dedup, consistent operation with very high, even 95%, storage utilization and tiering of older backup data to a cloud. Multiple generations of nodes can be used in one system prolonging hardware lifetime. Software-defined system reduces capex expenses by avoiding excessive overheads on the cost of hardware.
Release and Roadmap:
- 12/2025 – release 1.0 with 1u 12×20 TB SMC nodes, 180 nodes 43 PB raw
- 6/2026 – release 1.1: S3 dedup on client
- 11/2026 – release 1.2: 2u 24×20 TB nodes, 180 nodes 86 PB raw
- 1/2027 – release 1.3 – cold tier with 2u 24×36 TB nodes; 180 nodes, total 155 PB raw
Pricing model and price:
- Software: Subscription price based on raw TB/month with initial period of 3 years and 5 years including support
- Hardware ordered separately from hardware vendors based on hardware compatibility list
GTM:
Software-defined storage.
Sales through system integrators and sales agents. In case of SA sale, 9LivesData to play the integrator role.
Customers:
Currently under testing in large EMEA banks
Workloads/Use cases/Applications:
Support of practically all backup applications using standard interfaces like NFS/CIFS/S3. Additional special integration with backup applications like Cohesity NetBackup (OST), Veeam, Commvault or Nakivo.
Target market:
Any enterprise requiring large backup storage, in particular banks, financial institutions, government institutions.
Geographic markets:
EMEA and Central Asia
Competition:
Data Domain, ExaGrid, backup appliances from backup application vendors, home-made solutions based on Ceph with dedup provided by a backup app.
Comments
We had the opportunity to meet Cezary Dubnicki during the recent IT Press Tour in Athens, where the company officially unveiled its first release under the 9LivesData name.
9LivesData has long been - and continues to be - an active player in secondary storage through its SDS approach. The team previously built a highly respected product for NEC and also developed the data management solution that was later marketed by Starfish Software.
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High9Stor builds on the concepts and features originally introduced with NEC HYDRAstor, ensuring continuity and protecting customer investments by remaining fully compatible with previous deployments. Active testing and upgrade processes are already underway in the field, replacing NEC nodes, expanding grids with new nodes, and paving the way for future grid federation.
The development team has deliberately separated the access layer from the content and storage layer. Multiple access interfaces are supported, including S3, NFS, CIFS, dedicated backup software interfaces, and a native product interface. Meanwhile, the storage layer manages data chunking and delivers resilience across grid nodes through Reed–Solomon erasure coding.
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The strategy is firmly software-centric, with the intent to collaborate with a broad range of hardware vendors through joint go-to-market efforts, channel partnerships, and potential OEM relationships.
Upcoming milestones include support for multi-actuator HDDs, the introduction of QLC SSDs, broader compatibility with backup software platforms, S3 client-side deduplication, and the release of a variant tailored specifically for archival use cases. The overarching goal is to deliver a universal secondary storage platform for the enterprise market.
To accelerate growth, the company is actively expanding its reseller and partner ecosystem, strengthening its presence across the U.S. and EMEA regions.
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