Cloudian makes HyperStore object storage available from AWS

Object storage maker Cloudian has made its HyperStore product available from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, with all billing routed through AWS.

To take advantage of this, a customer must deploy Cloudian HyperStore at its datacentre and connect that deployment to AWS, where it will show the configuration and status of the HyperStore storage. Usage details and billing are then carried out through AWS.

In this setup, customers can store data locally on their Cloudian HyperStore object storage setup, but can also tier data to Amazon and use S3 and Glacier as off-site storage. Cost for this is about 3 cents per GB.

Cloudian has long had the ability to tier data off-site to Amazon S3 services, but buying it as a service from AWS is new.

Cloudian is object storage based on the Apache Cassandra open-source distributed database. It can come as hardware in the form of FL3000 series appliances or as storage software that customers can deploy on commodity hardware to create a peer-to-peer private cloud.

Cloudian is accessed via the network file system (NFS) file access protocol with interfaces to Amazon S3 that can be used as a tier of storage off-premise.

Object storage is an emerging method of data storage. It doesn’t aim to compete with the highest-performance block-and-file storage methods, but is well suited to large volumes of unstructured and, in some cases – such as with Cloudian – structured data.

Instead of the traditional tree-like file system structure, object storage uses a flat structure with files that are given unique identifiers, rather like the domain name system (DNS) on the internet. Those identifiers also contain metadata that allows for indexing of searches and data that can be interrogated for analysis purposes.

Cloudian’s FL3000 comes as a 3U data serving node with room for 16 MLC flash drives. Meanwhile, most of the storage is handled by 4U shelves with SATA drives.