Wasabi relieves Seagate of Lyve Cloud business

Independent public cloud provider Wasabi is buying Seagate's Lyve Cloud operation, with its S3-compatible cloud storage and Lyve Mobile rugged disk drive data transfer business.

Seagate is exiting this peripheral business to concentrate on its core nearline disk drive manufacturing and supply operation. Wasabi, which raised $70 million for AI cloud storage in January, gains additional distributed datacenter capacity and customers for its own cloud activities. Under the terms of the deal, Seagate will get equity in Wasabi and become a shareholder of the company. Additional financial terms were not disclosed.

David Friend, co-founder and CEO of Wasabi Technologies, said: "This acquisition strengthens our position as the world's leading pure-play cloud storage vendor. Seagate has built a loyal enterprise customer base for Lyve Cloud storage, and we welcome those customers to Wasabi. We are focused on supporting their growth with our global network of datacenters, innovative security features such as Covert Copy, AI-ready capabilities, partner integration tools, and technical support."

Seagate's Lyve Cloud portfolio consists of:

• Lyve Cloud – S3-compatible object storage at globally distributed Equinix datacenter locations. Partnerships with AWS and IBM COS
• Lyve Edge-to-Cloud Mass Storage Platform – moves large data volumes from distributed sites into cloud or core locations. Partners include Hammerspace and Zadara
• Lyve Mobile Array – portable, rackable, secure data transfer system using secure, rugged disk drives that allow data to be physically carried from edge sites to cloud locations
• Lyve Mobile Link – turns a Mobile Array into shared SMB or NFS storage

Seagate has Lyve Cloud partnerships with data protection (backup) suppliers Acronis, Cohesity, Commvault, Rubrik, IBM Spectrum Protect, and Veeam, plus Ahsay, Zmanda, Bacula Systems, and BorgBackup. They back up data and store it in Lyve Cloud. There are more partnerships for data management, migration, and access with Hammerspace, LucidLink, Flexify IO, SolutionStor, Cyberduck, S3 Browser, and Global Data Platform/GNS. There is overlap here as Wasabi already partners with Commvault, Rubrik, and Veeam.

Wasabi says this transaction strengthens its ability to serve enterprise backup and recovery workloads while maintaining cost-effective, predictable pricing (no egress fees, for example) outside the hyperscalers.

There are Lyve Cloud datacenters in the USA (Northern California, Northern Virginia, Texas), Europe (Frankfurt, London), Singapore and Japan (Tokyo), seven in total.

We understand Wasabi has 16 regions based on 14 datacenters in the US (Northern California, Northern Virginia, Oregon and Texas), Canada (Toronto), Europe (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Milan, Paris), Australia (Sydney), Japan (Osaka, Tokyo), and Singapore. There is obvious scope for consolidation, with Wasabi datacenters in all the Lyve Cloud datacenter locations.

Seagate CFO Gianluca Romano said: "This transaction is aligned with Seagate's strategic focus on its core mass-capacity storage business to meet the surging demand for data storage, while ensuring Lyve Cloud customers continue receiving exceptional support through Wasabi, a dedicated, independent cloud storage provider."