Gemini Joins OpenStack Community

Gemini Mobile Technologies, Inc. has joined the OpenStack community, adding Amazon S3 compatibility, provisioning and billing APIs to OpenStack software via its Cloudian cloud storage system.

"We are pleased to join the OpenStack community and participate with this rich, rapidly growing platform," said Giorgio Propersi, Gemini general manager, Americas and EMEA. "The Cloudian cloud storage system will help both public and private clouds build reliable, multi-tenant storage systems, enhancing the great solutions being built with OpenStack software already."

Backed by more than 125 participating organizations including Rackspace, Citrix, Dell, NASA and Cisco, OpenStack is a massively scalable, open source cloud operating system that is becoming the industry standard for public and private clouds. OpenStack has received nearly 50,000 downloads from the central code repository.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS)-compatible, multi-tenant Cloudian cloud storage system offers new capabilities and choices to the OpenStack community, and is complementary to Nova, Swift, and Glance. Cloudian provides OpenStack users with AWS S3 compatibility while its production-proven provisioning, user management and billing capabilities allow service providers and enterprise users to deploy AWS S3-like services. Cloudian also supports multiple backend stores, such as Cassandra, and will support Swift as a backend object store in the future.

Example use cases for the OpenStack community include:

Nova and Cloudian:

Applications running in the Nova environment can store and retrieve data using a Cloudian system via S3 API.
Existing applications from the S3 ecosystem requiring robust S3 API support can now run in Nova using Cloudian for data storage.

Swift and Cloudian:

Applications can now choose to use Swift or Cloudian, based on their API and feature requirements.
Applications can also simultaneously store data in both Cloudian and Swift systems.
Service providers can provide both Swift API and S3 API based public and private cloud solutions.

Glance and Cloudian:

Glance allows disk images to be stored to Amazon’s S3 service. With a configuration change, Glance users can now choose between storing disk images in their private system running Cloudian software, or Amazon’s S3 service.

The Gemini Cloudian – OpenStack distribution includes the latest release of Nova, Swift, Glance and Cloudian. An evaluation download can be requested.

About Cloudian
Cloudian software is an Amazon S3-compliant cloud storage platform that enables service providers and cloud providers to build reliable, multi-tenant data storage systems. Utilizing a NOSQL storage layer for maximum flexibility, service providers can now offer reliable and scalable cloud storage solutions utilizing low cost commodity hardware, while taking advantage of the broad number of applications in the Amazon Web Services ecosystem. Cloudian is designed to meet the demands of high volume and multi-tenant/multi-datacenter storage provisioning for virtualized resources, group support, quality of service controls, access control rights, reporting and billing, for public or private clouds.

Key features include:

Cost-effective SLA management: matches cluster deployments with customers SLAs and includes multi-datacenter replication.
Replication and Multi-Datacenters: fault tolerance and multi-datacenter support allows users to provide disaster recovery capability for customers.
Scalability: architecture offers a "plug and play" approach. Automatic load redistribution allows additional capacity to be added immediately.
S3 REST Advanced API Features: enables seamless interoperability of applications developed for Amazon S3-based storage clouds.
High Availability and disaster recover: built-in failover settings ensure that server failure does not impact the availability or integrity of data. Data is replicated on multiple servers in cluster.
Multi-Datacenter replication: the number of replicas is managed by system and group administrators. Administrators can configure replication value in order to meet SLA and cost objectives.
Access control: offers group- and user-level access control of objects and allows for read-only or read-write access for objects.
QoS control: provides group- and user-level control of total storage.