Storage


9LIVESDATA AND THE LEGACY OF HYDRA


When Cesary Dubnicki spoke to us recently, he did not begin with a product pitch. Instead, he told stories about missed opportunities with Amazon and Google, about Princeton research in the 1990s, and about the long arc of storage technology. He is less about selling and more about explaining how a niche but critical segment of enterprise infrastructure has evolved, and why continuity matters for customers who cannot afford disruption.


C


Cesary Dubnicki, founder 9LivesData


34 | January/February 2026


esary Dubnicki is the founder of 9LivesData, a Warsaw-based company with roots in NEC’s Princeton research labs. His


career has spanned the United States, Japan, and Europe, and he has spent more than two decades immersed in secondary storage. “I had many different opportunities,” he recalled, “but I decided to stick with storage and work in storage – and now I’m here talking about this product.” Te product in question is High9stor, a


soſtware-defined backup storage system designed to reduce the total cost of ownership while maintaining compatibility with NEC’s HydraStore. For channel partners, the story is not simply about a new system but about how existing customers


can continue to operate without being stranded by shiſting vendor strategies. Te origins of 9LivesData lie in NEC’s decision


to commercialise a research project called HydraStore. Dubnicki had led the architecture and algorithm design in Princeton, and when NEC wanted to convert the work into a commercial product, he returned to Poland to build a team that could deliver. “I told them, okay, I can do that, I can start a company, and I can productise this for you,” he said. HydraStore became one of the first commercial-


scale-out secondary storage systems with global deduplication. It scaled to thousands of nodes, storing exabytes of data across government and


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