Storage-Start-Up: Cynny Space

Cynny Space Srl is one of three companies with Cynny in their name. The first one is Cynny Inc. established in 2012 in California, then Cynny Spa was started in March 2013 and Cynny Space Srl in November 2015, both based in Florence, Italy.

In 2013 Cynny Spa also acquired a 2% stake in Ambedded Technologies Co. Ltd. Taiwan, a hardware engineering company. It raised more than €8.5 million with more than 600 investors.

The storage entity, Cynny Space, is led by Andrea Marchi, founder and CEO, and Stefano Baldi, CTO.

The company can be seen as a storage service company developing a software, what we can name today a SDS solution, and offering a cloud storage service at the same time.

They design an abject storage software, named SwARM, to run on ARM-based servers. They servers are in fact micro-servers with CPU, RAM and 2 Ethernet ports. A storage node is a micro-server plus one disk, and only one, and of course the Cynny Space software, SwARM. The 1:1 storage/server ratio is an important element of the design.

The philosophy is symmetric meaning that there is no master, central, coordinator, authority or metadata server, all are equals, illustrating perfectly a P2P model relying on DHTs. All servers are directly accessible by clients.

SwARM is a symmetric distributed file system built to leverage ARM characteristics. For Cynny, a file equals one object, an object is the sum of multiple chunks and a chunk is sub-divided in multiple parts across servers. To mount the file system on a client machine via NFS for instance, the mount point works at the bucket level.

The storage entity is exposed in two modes via a S3 compatible API and NAS protocols such NFS and SMB. The surprise comes from the name, the company uses VBS for Virtual Block Service to provide NFS and SMB. A file access is not a block access and vice-versa so why use the term block when a file access method is exposed. Strange. In the storage terminology, a storage entity is categorized by the interface it exposes, a storage array exposes a block interface like SCSI, a file server or NAS exposes NFS and/or SMB and an object storage exposes a http protocol like S3. A storage can expose multiple of these and we use the term unified or multi-protocol to characterize the storage solution.

For data protection, the team has developed a proprietary model delivering 11x9s of durability. Essentially it works at the sub-chunk level with a mix of parity and mirroring stored of course on different servers. The software provides also an other level of consistency check at the chunk level.

At the energy level, Cynny Space is with only 4W per terabyte.

But what differentiate Cynny Space from other players, at least some of them, is the service offering as they don’t stop at the software development stage. They provide cloud object storage based on data centers in Italy and France and just signed an partnership with Cirro Solution in UK and plan to deploy in Germany in the future. The second difference is that redundancy, data transfer and requests are all included at €0.01/GB/month in a pay as you go model. Thus it represents an interesting offering when you compare with cloud giants or alternatives such Backblaze B2 or Wasabi Storage.

The second flavor, more classic, is to consider an appliance as one time purchase or via subscription. The following slide shows these options.

In term of use cases, they do like other object storage vendors and support backup, archiving, disaster recovery, collaboration, multimedia, IoT and big data with log management and data acquisition and they have already certified their product with some vendors in each category.

Cynny Space is a recent entrant in the market, very confidential, but with an interesting value proposition.

The product approach, at least on the hardware design, has some similarities with what Igneous Systems initially built based on Marvell CPU board or what SNIA IP-based object drives tried to promote or also with Seagate Kinetic project.