9LivesData

9LivesData is a software R&D company based in Warsaw, Poland, focused on systems research and development. The team has spent 17 years building HYDRAstor, a scale-out storage system for NEC that became the world's fastest backup deduplication appliance. Those systems now run on five continents with thousands of enterprise installations storing exabytes of data. The company is recognized by clients for low bug density, high code quality, and competitive pricing. As of late 2025, they're preparing to launch high9stor, their own scalable secondary storage product that improves on HYDRAstor's architecture while maintaining backward compatibility with existing HYDRAstor nodes.

Services and capabilities

9LivesData concentrates on three technical domains. First, highly-scalable distributed systems: they design for linear scaling across dozens or hundreds of nodes, handle performance optimization, self-healing capabilities, resource management, and remote monitoring with anomaly detection. Second, storage systems—content-addressable storage, global deduplication, file system design, journaling, transactions, caching, and disk failure handling. Third, highly-reliable and highly-available systems that support non-stop operation through rolling and instant upgrades, hardware and software failure tolerance, and techniques like distributed consensus, randomized algorithms, and scalable garbage collection.

They work primarily in C++, supplemented by Java and Python. Development is supported by custom tools built around JIRA, including automated build servers, code propagation infrastructure, clustered test execution, and performance monitoring. The team follows Scrum adapted to their environment, with emphasis on iterative development, code review, continuous integration, unit testing, and daily scrums. Quality assurance is embedded into the development process, not bolted on: test planning happens in parallel with feature design, developers implement unit tests with code coverage tracking, and functional tests are automated using IBM STAF Framework. All code is subject to peer review and static analysis.

Beyond storage and distributed systems, they have expertise in compiler design and implementation, control-flow and data-flow analysis, register allocation, and native code generation for x86-64, Intel Itanium, Sun SPARC, and HP PA-RISC architectures. They've also built tools for agile project management, integrated time and issue tracking, and compiler optimization.

Notable work

Their marquee project is HYDRAstor for NEC Corporation, a deduplication storage appliance they designed and built through six generations. The system achieved "world fastest backup deduplication" status and now operates globally with thousands of deployments and exabytes of stored data without data loss.

For NEC's Data Science Laboratory in Silicon Valley, 9LivesData is developing Predictive Analytics Automation Technology. Three teams at the company work across the full stack: user interface, cloud-enabled deployment, and core algorithms written in Scala running on Apache Spark. The product automates predictive analysis workflows from feature extraction to model creation, enabling users without advanced data science skills to perform analysis in short timeframes.

With Bizerba, a German weighing and labeling technology provider with 150 years of history, 9LivesData is designing and building modern distributed data processing architecture using C/C++, Python, Go, and Java.

How they work

9LivesData structures engagements around three pillars: software development process, quality assurance, and management. They follow Scrum but emphasize that being agile doesn't mean chaotic—their process is mature and includes functional and technical design, design review, coding with unit tests, code review, functional and system testing, and ongoing maintenance. They use distributed compilation, automated build servers, code propagation, clustered test execution, and performance monitoring. The company currently does not accept new software development projects, as the team is focused on extending high9stor functionality.

Team and credentials

The company is led by Cezary Dubnicki. No total headcount is disclosed, but the source mentions "three teams at 9LivesData" working on the NEC predictive analytics product and notes they are "still expanding the team." No certifications, partner status, or third-party ratings are mentioned in the source.