Atlanta, GA (PRWEB) June 19, 2012
Cloud services firm Maldivica today announced the launch of Maldivica Storage Connector that promises to make object storage universally accessible. Built for the OpenStack Storage platform that is emerging as an industry standard for cloud infrastructure, Maldivica Storage Connector allows users to leverage the full power of object storage while overcoming several shortcomings frequently associated with transitioning from traditional Information Technology infrastructure. Maldivica Storage Connector seeks to democratize object storage and make it accessible to all.
The last decade has seen an explosion of data with businesses scrambling for more and more information to gain competitive advantage. According to IBM, Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data explosion and the consequent large complex data sets have been termed Big Data.
Firms have found that the best approach towards storing and processing Big Data is through object storage where data is not housed in volumes or attached to a directory as was the norm before, but stored as objects, each identifiable through its own unique ID and associated metadata (data about data). In recent years, there has been phenomenal growth in cloud computing, where services like storage are provided on-demand and per-unit basis. Cloud storage can offer multiple advantages over traditional storage in terms of cost savings, reliability, scalability and disaster recovery. Many cloud storage offerings are built on object storage technology.
However, end-users often face difficulties navigating object storage APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and migrating legacy data to an object-storage architecture. Maldivica co-founder and CEO Adam Bane mentioned that the idea for the Storage Connector was born to enable organizations to harness the power of object storage technology while eliminating or minimizing problems.Business users would rather use the data than try and deduce how to store and retrieve it. With the Storage Connector, we have eliminated the need for user-API interactions, thereby simplifying object storage significantly, he said. Additionally, the built-in metadata extractor pulls and organizes metadata content from Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), media files (images, audio, video), and a variety of other common file types to further enhance content storage and retrieval.
Bane pointed out that the Storage Connector also addresses the contentious issue of security which has discouraged some businesses from taking data offsite to the cloud. With customer-controlled keys to encrypt data during transit and at rest, Storage Connector ensures complete data security, he added. The product is vendor-independent, thereby ensuring that there is no lock-in and the customer is free to use any provider.
Maldivica believes that the Storage Connector is ideal in conjunction with object storage for the following scenarios: