Professional media and entertainment workflows often require high bandwidth and low latency storage to support rendering, transcoding and many other applications. Many companies provide various types of storage for this industry and cloud storage has been widely used. However, cloud applications and storage can be expensive and many M&E facilities use on-premises as well as cloud storage. Bridging the gap between the cloud and on-premise storage can be tricky. OpenDrives says that they have a solution to bridge this gap.
OpenDrives, a Los Angeles company, has been mostly known for building software-defined data storage solutions using SSDs and HDDs that are used in the media and entertainment and other industries. It recently announced the launch of Astraeus, a cloud-native data service platform and held an event about this new offering for customers and the press on October 15, 2025 at their Culver City headquarters.
Astraeus is a cloud-native data services platform. The company says that it enables IT departments within enterprise organizations to configure, store, orchestrate, manage, secure and deploy mission-critical applications dynamically on-premises, cloud or in hybrid environments. Astraeus should drive operational efficiencies and cost savings over cloud-dependent workflows and data environments because it helps control data fragmentation and sprawl.
During the event there were several horror stories about the dangers in cloud-first or cloud-only video production environments where e.g. the cloud applications were not stopped after active use and large expenses were incurred. Having data only in a cloud can also create a data silo, making it hard and expensive to use the data elsewhere. There were several stories about repatriating data on-premises from the cloud.
Open Drives said that their approach is different from current cloud and on-premises or even multi-cloud data environments. Sean Lee, the OpenDrives CEO says that out-come based data services are the right approach. Astraeus is built on cloud-native principles with a Kubernetes-based architecture and cluster-first design that creates a cloud-like experience. IT departments can deploy their cloud workflows locally while managing disparate data storage from a unified namespace that can scale out when the need arises, including bursting to the cloud. The figure below gives an idea of how Astraeus works.
Adding Astraeus to OpenDrives data storage and management platform allows customers to choose the storage that meets their workload needs. The Atlas data storage and management platform provides network attached storage, NAS, that provide high-bandwidth and low latency performance that meets media workflow needs. The Atlas Cloud Plus services extends this performance into the public cloud.
A slide from the event presented the cost advantages for the Astraeus with a GPU approach to using AWS. The Astraeus approach gives a predictable GPU node cost of about $1,312 per month or about $0.030 per minute. For that cost you get a full month of GPU use while you would only get about 6 hours of AWS HEVC transcoding.
A demonstration using the configuration shown below showed how Astraeus was able to work with a single GPU on an older Lenovo P620 computer with three Optimum NVMe storage nodes in the network. The demonstration showed good performance characteristics for a media workload.
OpenDrives showed how their Astraeus cloud-native data service platform enables Kubernetes-based high-performance storage for on-premises and hybrid cloud workloads.
