Object Storage Service From US Signal

US Signal LLC, a Midwest-based IT solutions provider, announced the addition of object storage to its portfolio of cloud storage solutions.

This service provides a cost-effective method for storing large quantities of non-transactional or unstructured data, making it for uses cases such as long-term file retention of archive data or backup data sets. It can also be used in conjunction with the firm’s file and block storage options to create a multi-tiered storage strategy.

Instead of organizing data into files or blocks as is the case with traditional storage systems, object storage uses variable-sized data containers known as objects. Each object consists of data; a unique object identifier; and metadata comprised of customizable attributes that users can use to tag objects. There is no folder structure. Without the limitations posed by folders, the number of object IDs can be increased for almost limitless scalability.

Customers can connect to the company’s SLA-backed object storage from anywhere, anytime, and with any device or application that supports S3 or Swift API calls. Storage API calls are made to high available public API gateways, which parse data into smaller fragments that are encoded and stored on multiple back end cluster resources for redundancy.

Unlike many other object storage service providers, the company does not charge for API operations or egress bandwidth charges. Customers are only charged for a committed capacity amount, which includes all API transaction fees and any ingress/egress bandwidth consumption.