This post is also available in: Italian

During the last IT Press Tour (the 14th), in the Silicon Valley (December 1-5, 2014) we met several companies in different categories (Cloud, Storage and Big Data).

The second company that we met on the second day was ObjectiveFS, an interesting company with a single but unique product in the cloud area.

Thomas Nordin (CTO and co-founder) has explain the company origin and their vision and mission.

ObjectiveFS is a secure cloud filesystem for data storage, targeting servers. ObjectiveFS gives you a hassle-free storage backend, comparable to something great sysadmin teams set up and maintain, but without the setup and maintenance overhead.

The idea is really simple, but the implementation and the solution itself is unique and almost curios.

This filesystem is completely:

• Serverless: it works directly inside your system without need of additional external components like VA or hardware appliance, in this way is also easy to manage, easy to scale in capacity and performance.
• Transparent: because it’s POSIX compliant you don’t need to change your applications and works with almost Unix systems (but actually limited only to Linux) and also MacOSX (the limit is that actually is not Windows compliance).
• Secure: you have full control your data with a strong end-to-end encryption (cloud secure crypto)
• Hybrid: works on premises and in the cloud and could be easy to offload in house workload to cloud

There are several interesting (and almost unique) aspects of this solution:

1. POSIX-compliant with a cloud backend. The standard POSIX semantics lets your regular unix tools to run without modification, and provides consistency guarantees.
2. Live distributed filesystem. All updates are immediately visible to all computers and cloud instances. This because works like a standard Unix Mount-point, like other filesystems.
3. Supports multiple writers and readers. Multiple nodes (local computers or cloud instances) can write to the same filesystem concurrently and see each other’s data.
4. No storage cluster needed. You don’t need to maintain a highly available redundant storage cluster.
5. Always-on strong end-to-end encryption. Your data is secure by default (and cannot be disabled), and is encrypted at rest and in motion.

So this solution is like a gateway to Amazon S3 (S3 backend charges are billed separately by Amazon and are not included in ObjectiveFS fee).

ObjectiveFS 2.2 is close to be released with several improvements in performance and scalability. This product is directly acquireble by ObjectiveFS (there isn’t yet a distribution or partners channel) and the pricing is public available on their site (there is also a 30 days trial).

For more information see also those other posts/articles:

• ObjectiveFS, une gateway SW bien pratique (French)
• ObjectiveFS : un système de fichiers Posix au-dessus de S3 (French)

Disclaimer: I’ve been invited to this event by Condor Consulting Group and they have paid for accommodation and travels, but I’m not compensated for my time and I’m not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than me.

Andrea Mauro

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.