In the late 1980s, there came Sybase SQL Server, a powerful relational database server that Microsoft bought and set out to compete with Oracle, Siebel, SAP and others. Later, when many IT administrators got fed up with being held hostage by then-standard MS lock-in tactics, MySQL — an open-source, freely downloadable version of the SQL database — came upon the scene from Europe and was greeted with a measure of love and warmth.
MySQL, bought by Sun Microsystems several years ago and now maintained by Oracle, still has a strong niche in many IT systems.
Now, there is NoSQL, a lightweight, open-source relational database that uses fields instead of tables and rows, thus handling unstructured data much better than the others. More and more new-generation IT systems are deploying it due to its inherent flexibility and low price. Free is not always best, but it is nearly always good.
With that as an introduction, Foster City, Calif.-based Gemini Mobile Technologies recently announced the commercial release of its Cloudian software, an Amazon S3-compliant cloud storage platform that enables service and cloud providers to build reliable, multi-tenant data storage systems. These are becoming more and more in demand, trust me.
Cloudian puts to work a NoSQL-based storage layer so that service providers can offer reliable and scalable cloud storage service packages utilizing commodity hardware. At the same time, they can take advantage of the large number of applications on the Amazon Web Services ecosystem menu.
Cloudian is designed for 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, private or hybrid clouds.
The Cloudian platform offers a fully distributed, peer-to-peer architecture, with no single point of failure, Gemini told The Station. The system is said to be able to scale from two nodes up to hundreds of nodes across multiple data centers and supports petabytes of data. System operators can use any brand of commodity server for scalability. Oh, and a nice feature: New node detection and data rebalancing is performed automatically without service interruption.
If you’re a cloud service provider, or thinking about adding such services to your IT system — whether for internal or external deployments — you might want to check this option out.
