| Features | Benefits |
|---|---|
| Leverages commodity hardware | No lock-in, lower price/GB |
| HDD/node failure agnostic | Self-healing, reliable, data redundancy protects from failures |
| Unlimited storage | Large and flat namespace, highly scalable read/write access, able to serve content directly from storage system |
| Multi-dimensional scalability | Scale-out architecture: Scale vertically and horizontally-distributed storage Backs up and archives large amounts of data with linear performance |
| Account/container/object structure | No nesting, not a traditional file system: Optimized for scale, it scales to multiple petabytes and billions of objects |
| Built-in replication 3✕ + data redundancy (compared with 2✕ on RAID) | A configurable number of accounts, containers and object copies for high availability |
| Easily add capacity (unlike RAID resize) | Elastic data scaling with ease |
| No central database | Higher performance, no bottlenecks |
| RAID not required | Handle many small, random reads and writes efficiently |
| Built-in management utilities | Account management: Create, add, verify, and delete users; Container management: Upload, download, and verify; Monitoring: Capacity, host, network, log trawling, and cluster health |
| Drive auditing | Detect drive failures preempting data corruption |
| Expiring objects | Users can set an expiration time or a TTL on an object to control access |
| Direct object access | Enable direct browser access to content, such as for a control panel |
| Realtime visibility into client requests | Know what users are requesting |
| Supports S3 API | Utilize tools that were designed for the popular S3 API |
| Restrict containers per account | Limit access to control usage by user |
| Support for NetApp, Nexenta, SolidFire | Unified support for block volumes using a variety of storage systems |
| Snapshot and backup API for block volumes | Data protection and recovery for VM data |
| Standalone volume API available | Separate endpoint and API for integration with other compute systems |
| Integration with Compute | Fully integrated with Compute for attaching block volumes and reporting on usage |
