Object Level Storage Australia - Macquarie Cloud Services

What is Object Storage?

Object level storage is also known as object storage or object-based storage. It is a type of data storage architecture that treats data as objects instead of file systems (which use a file hierarchy) or block storage (treats data as blocks). Each object includes the data, a variable amount of metadata, and some sort of unique identifier. Object storage is optimised to scale unstructured data (such as user generated content, like photos on Facebook). Our Launch^TM Object Level Storage solutions build on these capabilities to make new things possible, including:

Archive tiering to boost storage performance + lower total storage costs.
Media tier storage to scale cost-effectively.
Cloud native app support to reduce complexity and simplify global addressing.
Enhanced security, with a data encryption in flight, device separation and enhanced policies e.g. on versioning.
Better outcomes by design. Goodbye tape. Hello Cloud.

Australia’s most-recommended Object Level Storage Provider.

For some, storage is out of sight and out of mind. But with over 70% of IT budgets already consumed by legacy costs¹, and over 82% of Australian organisations experiencing lost data last year²choosing the right solution has never been more important.

No two organisations start from the same place, or have the same goals, so no two solutions should be the same either. We deliver:

Quota management and oversubscription for your namespace pool of storage
Expertise on demand, with over 200 engineers security cleared to government standards, over here, not over there, for your retention, encryption, budget & compliance requirements
Best-practice multi-node resilient design
Transparent pricing and service assurance e.g. free from variable fees for data egress, retrieval or API transactions

Our single site or multi-site solutions are protected by design against logical corruption, human error, disk failure and site failure and can lock down objects with specific retention policies to ensure compliance.

1

Your Namespace.

A logical storage container spanning multiple instances of physical hardware for location-independence without requiring a file system to govern data placement. Multiple nodes and sites appear as one logical storage system. Replication and geo-distribution of data is driven by policies namespace-by-namespace, bucket-by-bucket or even object-by-object rather than costly dedicated replication and backup infrastructure.
2

Your Bucket.

A namespace may be sub-tenanted into further logical containers of object data, called buckets. Generally a bucket is created per application, workflow, or user.
3

Your Object.

Contains data, meta-data, and a unique global identifier. The data element is typically a file and together with its metadata and ID gets bundled up to form an object. An application retrieves the object by presenting the object ID to object storage. Customisable policies assign metadata to the object such as the type of application the object is associated with, the importance of an application, the level of data protection, the replication settings and when to delete this object. This provides ease of management, application access via APIs and flexibility at scale.

What service will you receive from Macquarie Cloud Services?

Macquarie Cloud Services is responsible for providing the service to the customer as follows:

Service Delivery – Project managing the provisioning of the service.

HMC – Customers will be notified of any incidents by our Hosting Management Centre, who will manage these incidents until resolved.

Specialist Team – platform support, maintenance and overall capacity planning.
In addition, the HMC may assist the customer for password resets and credentials assistance. You can find out more about our service model here.

Product Features.

Unlimited Operations.

The solution provides "all you can eat" capability across transactions, data transfer, acceleration & support. No additional charge for SSL termination, or to load balance requests.

Multi-protocol Data Access.

The platform supports cloud native applications as well as inbuilt support for customer premise EMC arrays tiering out to a MCS Cloud Archive.

Customisable Policies.

Set policies to determine encryption, retention, versioning and compliance settings.

User Management.

The solution supports 2 types of users, management users and object users.

Encryption in flight.

Customers access the service over SSL, to encrypt sessions between the client and the ECS environment. The SSL sessions terminate on the load balancer infrastructure where they are decrypted / encrypted.

Data Durability.

Data durability ( without loss or corruption ) has been estimated by EMC as 99.999999999%, although different Service Level Guarantees can apply depending on your preferred design.

Geo Resilience.

Global replication groups span multiple federated clusters and protect objects against disk, node, and site failures. Local replication groups protect objects within the same location against disk or node failures.

Quota Management.

The sum of bucket quotas may be set to be greater than the namespace quota to maximise utilisation efficiency. Soft limits for quota management are set for your needs, with extras available for scalability.

Load Balancing.

Nodes are locally load balanced with redundant appliances to distribute traffic load across the compute nodes and sites in a round robin fashion.

Logging.

Basic bucket operations like create, delete, update, set or change bucket owner are logged by Macquarie Cloud Services. Namespace operations such as namespace_admin_user events, creation, deletion are logged. Both logs are available for up to 3 months.

Have a question about object level storage?

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^{1 Gartner Australia, 2016; vForum VMware by Broadcom Keynote, Oct17}

^{2 Ovum Research Australia, 2016; Data protection is becoming another driver for cloud adoption, Alan Rodger|02 Sep 2015}

What is Object Storage?

Australia’s most-recommended Object Level Storage Provider.

Your Namespace.

Your Bucket.

Your Object.