Basho Unveils Riak CS, Multi-Tenant Cloud Storage Software

Basho Technologies, Inc., in distributed database technologies, unveiled Riak CS, an enterprise software providing distributed cloud storage at any scale.

The release of Riak CS positions Basho to strategically participate in the growing cloud storage market.

Riak CS allows organizations to benefit from storage capabilities similar to Amazon S3 by enabling the following scenarios:

• Powering Public Clouds. Communications and service providers can deploy Riak CS to power their public cloud storage and create differentiated services;
• Powering Private Clouds. Enterprises can leverage Riak CS to implement a private storage cloud, gaining control over costs, features and security;
• Enabling New Web-based Services. Web-based businesses and start-ups can offer customers an S3-compatible API for their download service or internal use.

"Basho now has the capability to change the existing dynamics in Big Data storage and is committed to capitalizing on these capabilities to be a major provider of software to the rapidly evolving cloud storage market," said Don Rippert, CEO at Basho Technologies. "Enterprises are increasingly powering their businesses on public and private clouds. Communication providers and cloud operators around the world are building out highly scalable public cloud computing infrastructure with aggressive economics and offering a variety of service levels. We anticipate that large enterprises will also seek similar technology to deploy behind-the-firewall to handle dynamic workloads and meet emerging Big Data requirements throughout their organizations. Backed by years of developing distributed database software, Riak CS is well positioned to serve as the catalyst that enables the next era of the cloud storage market, powering both fast-growing public clouds and super efficient private clouds."

Notable features of Riak CS:

• Multi-Tenant: Riak CS’s multi-tenant cloud storage allows enterprises to achieve economies of scale, more efficiently manage compute resources and deliver storage-as-a-service to internal and external users.
• Amazon S3 API Compatibility: It is compatible with the S3 API, providing an interface and allowing enterprises to use existing S3 tools and frameworks or import and extract Amazon data.
• Reporting: Enterprises gain visibility and control of their public or private cloud with per-tenant usage data and statistics on network I/O. Its reporting supports use cases including billing, accounting, subscription, chargebacks and multi-department utilization.
• Simple Object storage: It allows enterprises to easily store and retrieve images, text, video, documents, database backups, software binaries and other content up to 5GB per object.

"New technologies have emerged to handle the explosion of information, systems complexity and user numbers," said Merv Adrian, VP of research, Gartner. "Big Data is a popular proxy for this concept, but encourages an inappropriate focus on volume. IT organizations must understand that big data projects may fail if they don’t also pay attention to velocity (streams), variety (multiple structures), and complexity. IT must supply the right infrastructures to respond to dynamic business requirements; that means significant re-engineering and budget changes. For example, storage requirements for big data are unpredictable. Data is growing faster than storage capacity and computing power. Legacy systems hold organizations back; storage software must include multi-petabyte capacity, support potentially billions of objects, and provide application performance awareness and agile provisioning. Gartner encourages businesses to understand vendor road maps for big data technologies and to consider private and public cloud infrastructures, as they offer many of the characteristics required by big data use cases." (Gartner, Big Data Challenges for the IT Infrastructure Team, February 10, 2012.)

"Simple object storage has become one for the core services driving adoption of public cloud platforms and we have already seen an expression of interest in the potential of Riak CS to supply similar capabilities for private clouds from our client base prior to its official release," commented Matt Aslett, research manager, data management and analytics, 451 Research. "We expect to see more given its core functionality and compatibility with the Amazon S3 API."

Enterprises can now sign up for a Riak CS Development License, a package that includes both software and support for the initial release.