Moonwalk In-Cloud Storage Tiering for Amazon Web Services

Moonwalk Universal Pty Ltd, in large-scale data management solutions, announced extended support for AWS EC2 and S3 providing AWS customers the ability to reduce the cost of their provisioned EC2 Elastic Block Storage (EBS) and leverage the cost efficiency of S3.

As featured in a recent AWS customer case study, a large diversified property group had elected to embrace a service model for all computing and storage and migrated these operations to AWS EC2. While being happy with the EC2 service, this customer needed a strategy to address the increasing costs associated with retaining unstructured data on their EC2 provisioned storage.

The solution had to be cost effective, allowing dynamic and customizable use of both SSD for active data and more durable, lower cost storage for long term retention of inactive data. Furthermore, the solution had to be transparent to end users and applications, avoiding workflow disruption and business process impact.

After reviewing various options available, Moonwalk and AWS S3 was chosen.

With Moonwalk’s patented light weight architecture, it was a matter of running it as a service in the customer’s EC2 environment. It was just load and go.

The inactive file content is identified by the Moonwalk Policy Engine and dynamically migrated from EC2 instance EBS to S3, lowering the instance running costs and providing the benefits of S3 storage. Original file metadata and security is maintained, and the file content is transparently and automatically streamed from S3 to EC2 instance EBS on user or application access.

The ROI provided by the Moonwalk S3 solution is significant with the EC2 instance EBS costs being reduced by around 80%.

While the case study centers on a large company, it highlights a solution that is applicable for any organization using AWS EC2 EBS, and all the more so with the release of MW Starter Edition available free to users with up to 25TB.

Benefits of Moonwalk include: