Amazon S3 or OpenStack, Take Your Side!

Cloud storage market is inherently divided. If you are in US, you may be using Amazon S3. If you are an AT&T customer, you may be using Synaptic Storage. If you are in Germany, the privacy law may require data not leaving the country boundary.

The country boundary, the MSP (Managed Service Provider) boundary and the geographic regions are all parameters that divide the cloud storage market up into pieces.

When the market is divided, if a MSP moves quickly, it can capture good market share.

This leaves each MSP scramble to beat the market with a cloud storage offering. But which cloud storage software to use? Which cloud storage API to conform to? Which way provides the quickest time-to-market?

Here at Gladinet, we are seeing basically 4 groups of offering after doing many integrations with our partners to offer end-to-end cloud storage solutions to user’s desktop.

    1. Amazon S3 compatible API
    2. OpenStack, AKA, Rackspace Cloud
    3. Microsoft Azure
    4. EMC Atmos

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We are seeing more and more service providers supporting S3-Compatible APIs. If Google is supporting S3-compatible API in its Google Storage for Developer (GSD), it may be common sense to see other companies doing the same. For example, Germany-based Dunkel supports S3-compatible API. Mezeo Software also announced availability of Mezeo Interoperability API. Amazon S3 so far has the biggest developer community.

In US, Rackspace is the 2nd biggest player, behind Amazon S3 in cloud storage, with its Rackspace Cloud offering. The technology behind the Rackspace cloud is also becoming an open source initiative – OpenStack. We’ve seen partners leveraging OpenStack to implement their own cloud storage offering. Rackspace also has a huge collections of developer tools and applications at the cloud tool site.

We saw Windows Azure and EMC Atmos but they depend on hardware instead of pure software. We have yet to see other service providers conforming to their API interfaces.

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So this basically divided the cloud storage camp into two, Amazon S3 compatible or OpenStack compatible. Microsoft or EMC may not care but a lot more do care. At the end, it is a fight for developers and application supports.

Note: Gladinet is in the middle of adding support for Rackspace Cloud and OpenStack.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Good move. Rackspace and the 25 other partners actively developing solutions for OpenStack are committed to open standards, and making contributions to open source software. For regional storage suppliers to be successful, they must have a common API that each supports so that tools can work seamlessly between them. Unlike several attempts at open standards for cloud storage and computing, OpenStack is different, because it has the support of so many companies, and Rackspace fully committed to do what it takes to make it a success.

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