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Nodeum to add S3 connectivity to LTFS-powered tape archive
Belgium-based Linux-plus-LTFS startup adds S3 capability to allow customers to add cloud as a tier and data portability between on and off-premises archiving
Belgian startup Nodeum is to add S3 connectivity to its Linux-plus-LTFS-tape archive product.
The new functionality will allow users to use the Amazon cloud as a further tier of storage. This, in turn, will allow data portability between on and off-premises archives and potentially avoid cloud provider lock-in.
Nodeum – the product of Belgian consulting firm MT-C – uses the highly scalable Linux journaling file system Ext4 on disk as a means of indexing the content catalogue and metadata in front of tape archives that are accessed via the LTFS file system.
The linear tape file system (LTFS) puts a file system on top of a tape library and turns it into something like a tape-NAS, making it suitable for archive use cases.
In may Nodeum will also provide S3 storage connectivity. This is Amazon’s de facto object storage capability, which can be used in its cloud or on-site on customer storage.
CEO Valery Guilleaume said: “We’re going for a different business case here. It will allow customers to secure a certain amount of content on S3 so they can store data externally. Also the reverse is possible, allowing them to get data back on-premise.”
“Customers find cloud easy and cheap, and scale what they store there. Then they become concerned about cloud provider lock-in or want to bring data back to archive it on-premise, or even move it to another provider. They can do that with S3.”
Read more about cloud and archiving
- Amazon S3 has emerged as a de facto standard for accessing data in the cloud. We run the rule over S3, its key attributes and what you need to know to use it with your applications.
- In-house tape vs cloud archiving: Have cloud archiving services reached a tipping point that makes them cheaper and easier to manage than in-house tape archives?
Nodeum’s S3 capability will allow its use as an S3-capable target, an S3-compatible tier of storage and to migrate between S3 instances on or off-site.
The Nodeum product comes as software-only or can be supplied on qualified hardware. It connects via network file system (NFS) or common internet file system (CIFS) to customer infrastructures and connection to Isilon and NetApp NAS systems is possible.
Disk capacity ranges from 20-something TB upwards while tape capacity goes from 50TB to somewhere around half a petabyte although nodes can be added to give almost unlimited capacity.
In 2016, Nodeum leveraged its highly scalable Ext4 file system to provide rish indexing that customers can link to core apps.
