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May 12, 2008
Mosso Testing S3 Alternative
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Anyone thinking about storing data in the cloud has another option to think about. Rackspace, the giant IT systems hosting company, and Mosso, its cloud division, last week rolled out a new cloud storage service that one observer says "leapfrogs" Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service). CloudFS is a hosted scalable system that Mosso says developers can use to securely store nearly unlimited amounts of data on the Web, and pay for it on an as-used basis.
“Basically, we’re offering a scalable storage system that can be tailored to the user’s needs,” says Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce. “It will appeal to a broad range of businesses, but it’s primarily focused at people who want to integrate massively scalable storage into their applications.”
Developers access Mosso’s storage platform through a RESTful Web services API and language-specific APIs (Java, .NET, Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP). “We think developers prefer a storage system that’s API-accessible and lets them use industry standard tools,” Bryce says. “They can customize and integrate the system to meet their needs. For example, they can have data come in from a desktop through this API and the system makes sure it’s written and copied and kept redundant.”
Customers who use Mosso’s hosting service will have a performance advantage because they won’t experience the latency that’s typical of tapping stored files over the Internet, says John Engates, chief technology officer of Rackspace. “If you want to use S3, you have to go over the public Internet. It’s all remote. But if you come in over our infrastructure, you’re closer to your application from a network perspective. If you build your app on the Mosso platform, you can have your application infrastructure close to your cloud and storage.” Faster access to stored data will be a “critical business advantage,” Engates says.
Under the current private beta-test program, users will access data through Rackspace’s storage and server infrastructure. In the future, customers will have the option of accessing the service over the Web. (For now, storage is hosted in the company’s Dallas datacenter, but Rackspace has seven others it could add to the mix.)
Mosso says the current beta program will last until the third quarter of this year, followed by a public beta test, with the official opening expected by the end of the year. The company hopes to enlist about 100 serious users for the private phase, Engates says. Interested users can apply for the beta program at www.mosso.com/cloudfs.
Storing data in CloudFS costs 15 cents per gigabyte per month (at least during this initial phase). Customers who access their data over the Web rather than Rackspace’s network will be charged extra for data transfer and, as with Amazon S3, file sizes are limited to 5GB (the similar but less publicized Nirvanix allows files up to 256GB). The cost of data transfer on S3 is 10 cents per gigabyte in, and between 10 cents and 17 cents per gigabyte out.
Not Just Storage, but Compliant Storage
Mosso emphasizes that it’s offering companies more than just a place to put stuff. Service and support will be a key part of CloudFS, officials say. “People want options. They want more IT services,” Bryce says. “Rackspace has been hosting IT systems for 10 years and has developed the kind of support and comfort people will want as they move business into the cloud.”
That support goes beyond troubleshooting technical problems. One of the big challenges Mosso will help with is storing data in accordance with federal regulations. “Meeting regulatory criteria is something we know how to do,” Bryce says. “We know how to deal with Sarbox [Sarbanes-Oxley requirements for financial information] and HIPAA [Health Information Portability and Accessibility Act]. We know how to deal with auditors and federal security requirements. Some of our customers will be people who wanted to use S3 but couldn’t because of these concerns.”
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