Exporting storage space via S3

Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure allows you to export cluster disk space to customers, in the form of an S3-compatible object storage.

Object storage is optimized for storing billions of objects, in particular for application storage, static web content hosting, online storage services, big data, and backups. Compared to other types of storage, the key difference is that parts of an object cannot be modified; so if the object changes, a new version of it is created instead. This approach eliminates the issue of conflicts.

Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure can store replicas of S3 cluster data and keep them up to date in multiple geographically distributed datacenters. Geo-replication reduces the response time for local S3 users accessing the data in a remote S3 cluster, or remote S3 users accessing the data in a local S3 cluster, as they do not need an Internet connection.

Geo-replication schedules the update of the replicas as soon as any data is modified. Its performance depends on the Internet connection speed, the redundancy mode, and cluster performance.

If you have multiple datacenters with enough free space, it is recommended to set up geo-replication between S3 clusters residing in these datacenters, as described in "Replicating S3 data between datacenters" in the Administrator Guide.

Before creating an S3 cluster, make sure you have a DNS name for the S3 gateway.