Cubbit DS3 Composer brings DIY cloud to object storage pool

Italy-based startup Cubbit has announced the availability of the DS3 Composer, which will create S3-compatible private object storage clouds from on-premise, bare metal colocation and cloud storage capacity.

DS3 claims its storage is resilient and secure, and can be configured as-a-service for users and customers. It also allows customers to create pools of object storage – aimed at unstructured data – from unused capacity on-premise or in locations that include the cloud.

Cubbit’s S3-based object storage targets customers, including enterprises and MSPs, that want secure, resilient and sovereign storage for use cases such as backup – 80% of its customers so far – and other, less-than-mission-critical workloads, such as content delivery and collaboration.

Enrico Signoretti, vice-president of products and partnerships with Cubbit, said: “Previously our customers had just our cloud. Now everybody can build their own infrastructure. Everybody has a user interface from which they can build a storage service in a few minutes.

Cubbit customers are currently largely confined to Italy, where it has just more than 200 deployments. Signoretti said it has “a couple” of proofs-of-concept running in France now, too.

Customers range from small and medium-sized enterprises and small service providers to MSPs with several PB of data.

“What’s now possible is to customise the solution for yourself and your customers,” said Signoretti.

Cubbit’s DS3 Composer builds a peer-to-peer cloud built on customer nodes – physical or virtual – on-site, acting as a gateway and broker in a mesh with other customer nodes, known as “the swarm”.

Data is encrypted via AES-256 and distributed in shards across other nodes in the swarm. Signoretti said latency ranged “from a few milliseconds to dozens of milliseconds.”

Minimum node deployment is three, which allows for data to be sharded for resilience and security. Nodes can be on-site or in the cloud, although the latter is less cost-effective and bare metal is the preferred option if a node is off-site to the customer. Equinix bare metal capability will be added “soon”, according to Signoretti.

The company is keen to stress that with the DS3 composer, use cases can include building pools from unused storage.

The company claims customers in sectors that include defence, food production, healthcare and manufacturing. Use cases targeted are heavily biased towards backup currently, as well as archiving, media and entertainment, and enterprise file sharing.

Unstructured data is a big and growing space, as customers try to gain value from vast stores of backups, files, images and logs. Object storage is an increasingly popular choice for unstructured data because it’s good at storing very large volumes of data with metadata that allows for more information than existing file formats.

One customer cited by the Cubbit team is Italian defence manufacturer Leonardo. According to Cubbit, Leonardo plans to roll out numerous nodes across EMEA and APAC from early 2024. The company has 180 sites across the world, and the attraction of Cubbit is that all of its data needs to be kept on-site with a high level of resilience and security. Resilience, for example, is delivered by the fact that no data is kept in one place and is accessible from all locations.