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Anthony Cusimano, Director of Solutions Marketing and one of the company’s earliest employees, provides a roadmap of the company’s rapid hardware and software evolution. Since its inception with OOTBI (Out-of-the-Box Immutability), Object First has expanded its portfolio to include the Ootbi 432, a 2U-node offering 432 terabytes of RAID 60 storage. A single four-node cluster can reach 1.7 petabytes, and through integration with Veeam’s Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR), users can scale beyond seven petabytes. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the company introduced the Ootbi Mini, a compact tower designed for edge locations and small businesses that delivers the same “absolute immutability” and honeypot features as the enterprise nodes but in a smaller, desk-friendly form factor.
A major shift in the company’s business model is the introduction of a consumption-based subscription service alongside the traditional perpetual ownership model. This model is supported by a specialized sizing calculator designed to navigate the complexities of immutable storage retention. To ensure a seamless experience, Object First requires telemetry for subscription customers; this allows the company to proactively monitor usage and ship a larger “Box B” before a customer hits their capacity threshold. The transition is designed to be a white glove migration where data is moved to the new appliance and the old hardware is returned, providing a predictable OpEx cycle that avoids the steep cost jumps typically associated with traditional hardware refreshes.
Looking toward the immediate future, Cusimano provided a sneak preview of the Fleet Manager platform, scheduled for official launch on May 6, 2026. Fleet Manager is a secure, cloud-based single pane of glass designed for managed service providers (MSPs) and large enterprises to monitor multiple Object First clusters across various global sites. Driven by telemetry, the tool provides unified visibility into system health, storage utilization, and honeypot alerts without ever touching or transferring actual backup data, maintaining strict zero-trust principles. Future updates to Fleet Manager aim to include centralized S3 bucket creation and remote firmware updates, further simplifying the management of large-scale immutable storage environments.
Personnel: Anthony Cusimano
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