OpenStack Storage Gets Boost With Riak Compatibility

The OpenStack cloud platform got a boost today with the news that Basho Technologies has added OpenStack storage support to the newly-released version 1.4 of its Riak CS software, which will extend OpenStack’s capabilities for distributed storage.

The open source Riak distributed database automatically redistributes data across multiple data centers when you scale, and keeps data available when physical machines fail. Riak CS (cloud storage) is simple, available cloud storage, in the company’s words. It’s open source storage software based on Riak.

"It’s easy to add another node to a cluster is a single command,” said Bobby Patrick the CMO of Basho. "We’ve made it very easy to build large distributed cloud storage that spans multiple locations. That’s what CS does very well.”

Riak CS 1.4 Enterprise significantly boosts the performance of multi-datacenter replication by allowing for concurrent channels, so the full capacity of the network and cluster size can scale the performance to available resources.

The company has also enhanced Riak CS to now support OpenStack’s Keynote authentication service, and it is now formally compatible with OpenStack Object Storage API. This adds a second major cloud, as it supports CloudStack as well. Additionally, Amazon Web Services S3 compatibility was part of the first Riak CS launch. The OpenStack compatibility will appeal to enterprises or service providers looking to build a distributed cloud storage on OpenStack.

History of Basho Riak CS

“Last year, in March 2012 Riak CS, turned the database, which is a distributed, high performance database, into a multi-cloud object store in a box,” said Patrick. “Riak CS is a little over a year old, and counts over 250 users worldwide like Yahoo Japan, who uses Riak for cloud storage. In the U.S., customers like Datapipe and tier 3 hosting, and a number that we couldn’t mention, use it to power their cloud.” The customers Patrick mentions use it in combination with CloudStack. OpenStack compatibility opens the company up to a whole new userbase, with OpenStack having significant mindshare in the market. This lets users switch out the Swift API for this.

Riak is open source, distributed database with Basho offering an enterprise version of both it and Riak CS. The enterprise edition includes multi-data center replication in addition to full, 24 hour support. The company touts, from a paying customer perspective, nearly a third of the fortune 50, meaning it has solid footing in the mission critical world.

"The updates are about speed and performance, and making it very easy to replicate,” said Patrick.  “They’re about simplifying operations management over 100s or 1000s of nodes spread across multiple data centers. Most of our additions are making it easier to scale, as well as speed up operational query data out of object stores.”

“This is aimed at Service providers or large enterprises,” said Patrick. “A large enterprise CIO says ‘I’ve got large infrastructure, and I want economics and versatility of cloud’ would use this. High availability is critical to that story – and the only way to do this is have it stored across multiple locations.”