Tier 3 Launches Distributed Storage Service

Tier 3
Inc., provider of public and cloud infrastructure tools,
announced the availability of a distributed object storage service
with data center redundancy.

Powered by Basho’s
Riak CS enterprise, this service offers enterprises cloud storage
for files of any type and any size. Files – or ‘objects’ – stored in
the company’s cloud are replicated to a secondary in-country data
center. This feature provides native HA that improves reliability
and ensures that data will never vanish into the ether.

Most existing cloud-based object
storage systems require additional engineering work to enable this
capability, a burden that many IT professionals and developers would
rather not carry.

"Object storage in the cloud
has proven to be a best practice for real-time backups and archiving.
With the launch of this service, Tier 3 has added a layer of
enterprise-grade capabilities on object storage, with automatic
redundancy to a second geographic location," said Jared
Wray, founder and CTO, Tier 3. "Partnering with Basho has
allowed us to provide enterprises with a simple, scalable storage
platform for their applications and data. Furthermore, this service
will support data sovereignty scenarios for sensitive data."

It offers enterprise cloud – a
collection of services that includes virtual servers running in the
public cloud, cloud management functions like automation and
orchestration, as well as a platform as a service offering based on
cloud Foundry. The company operates nine data centers worldwide.

The service is available in its two
Canadian data centers, with additional locations in the U.S.
scheduled for next quarter. Rollout will extend to data centers in
the U.K. and mainland Europe thereafter. Users pay monthly for the
amount of storage allocated on the company’s federated cloud data
centers, and may scale storage up or down as desired.

The replication of data to separate
data center also delivers on a requirement for enterprise cloud
deployments – geo-data locality. It allows enterprises to
pre-determine the physical locations of specific data. This can be
used not only to address regulatory compliance, but also to improve
the end-customer experience through ultra low latency.

To help deliver this service, the
company chose Riak CS enterprise. This cloud storage software runs on
top of Riak, an open-source distributed database that provides HA,
fault tolerance, and operational simplicity.

"Businesses are increasingly
asking for options to meet their rapidly growing and diverse object
storage requirements," said Justin Sheehy, CTO, Basho.
"Tier 3’s offering is powerful as it emphasizes enterprise
requirements for security and resiliency while also providing the
flexibility users expect from a public cloud. Basho is excited to see
Riak CS’ unique multi-data center replication perform as a core
component underlying Tier 3’s new global cloud object storage
offering."

Customer demand fuels development of
object storage as cloud adoption continues apace, so too does the
demand for cloud storage. In a research note, Gartner predicts
worldwide cloud IaaS storage for end-user spending to grow at a 31% CAGR, from an estimated $1.7B in 2013 to a
forecast $4.9B in 2017.

Object storage is fueling much of this
growth, since it is tailored for many enterprise scenarios, including
hosting of multimedia files, backups, archives, transfer of large
files, and much more.

Highlights include:

• Storage for large
  objects. Users may store any type of file in the
  cloud – images, videos, documents, database backups, archives, and
  more. It supports direct uploads for files up to 5GB, while larger
  files may be stored using multipart file uploads.

• Storage for Public Files, plus
  permissions to keep objects private. Users may host public files with
  object storage – for example, images used in web applications or
  downloadable multimedia content. For additional security, files are
  flagged as private by default.

• Geographic Redundancy and
  HA. It offers multi-datacenter replication natively, with HA
  built-in.

• S3 Compatibility. Users familiar
  with S3 may re-use existing code assets with this object storage
  service. The company’s API supports service, bucket, and object-level
  operations. In addition, object storage from Tier 3 is compatible
  with many S3 file management utilities.

• Key-Pair Permissions. System
  administrators may store collections of files in buckets that are
  protected with unique key-pairs. Admins can point-and-click to assign
  permissions to other users as needed.

• Scalability. Object storage can
  scale to any size desired.