markrubens - Fotolia
Nodeum adds clouds to boost tape-to-hybrid-cloud platform
Belgian startup’s Linux-based storage environment now stretches from on-premise disk, LTFS tape and NAS to hybrid cloud working via AWS and Azure public clouds, with more planned
Belgium-based startup Nodeum has added further S3-based cloud options to its disk-plus-LTFS-tape secondary storage environment.
In a further push towards hybrid cloud operations, S3 access now extends to Microsoft Azure – it already had AWS – with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) access planned.
Also new in its 1.67 release is connectivity to private clouds on the Dell EMC ECS platform, to add to those from storage providers Cloudian and Scality. It also plans to add connectivity to object storage in OpenStack Swift “in two weeks” along with GCP, said CEO Valery Guilleaume.
The new functionality will extend Nodeum users’ reach from its original focus of disk (HDD and/or flash) and LTFS tape to a range of private and public cloud platforms with tiers of storage across hybrid cloud environments possible.
The company has also added a number of policy-based workflows to the Nodeum platform.
Guilleaume said: “For example, data that’s not accessed after five days could be moved from disk to on-premise object store. After 30 days of not being accessed, it could be moved to public cloud. The customer can develop their own strategy using policies.”
Nodeum is the product of Belgian consulting firm MT-C. It uses the highly scalable Linux journaling file system Ext4 on disk as a means of indexing the content catalogue and metadata in front of tape archives that are accessed via the LTFS file system.
The linear tape file system (LTFS) puts a file system on top of a tape library and turns it into something like a tape-NAS, making it suitable for archive use cases.
Last year, Nodeum added S3 storage connectivity. This is Amazon’s object storage capability, which has emerged as something of a de facto standard.
Read more on hybrid cloud
- Survey by 451 Research finds most organisations use a mix of on-premise and cloud locations, but truly seamless hybrid cloud operations are very difficult to achieve.
- This year’s storage news so far has provided a firm impression of the increasing prominence of the cloud, and in particular of attempts to harness the public cloud and private datacentre in hybrid operations.
According to Guilleaume, Nodeum offers a single pool of storage across in-house disk and tape and public cloud. This potentially enables hybrid cloud operations, with seamless movement of data between on-premise and public cloud locations claimed, as well as between clouds.
“We can open an AWS bucket without touching it and put the Nodeum file system on top,” said Guilleaume. “The same is the case in on-premise object storage like Scality.”
Other added features include LTFS tape cataloguing, which the company said will enable customers to catalogue an entire tape to LTFS in three minutes, allowing it to be searched and its metadata used.
NAS as a secondary storage has also been added, as has support for the latest LTO-8 tapes.
Nodeum comes as software-only or can be supplied on certified server hardware. It connects via network file system (NFS) or common internet file system (CIFS) access to customer infrastructures.
