Introduction to GleSYS Object Storage

Introduction

With GleSYS Object Storage you can store unstructured data like images, video, backup files and more. It's easy to download files from anywhere via the HTTP-protocol. Object storage is suitable for storing web resources and other data.

GleSYS Object Storage supports the Amazon Web Services S3 API. There are a number of client libraries and software you can use to communicate with the service. For example s3cmd that you can read more about here.

With our object storage service you get a cost-effective storage solution. You can start out small and grow from there. You only pay for the storage you use. As opposed to many other storage solutions you don't pay for unused space and the service is infinitely scalable. No more hard drives that run out of space.

The technical advantage together with an attractive price makes this service very affordable. Especially if you compare it to regular hard drives.

Suggested usages

• Store backups
• Store WordPress media
• Store large volumes of unstructured data
• Storage of rapidly growing data sets
• Distribution of software

Basic concepts

The object storage service stores unstructured data. You can simply compare it to a file system like this:

Instance

The instance is the root level of the object storage. It's comparable to a hard drive/partition. An instance is created using our cloud control panel at cloud.glesys.com. When created you connect to the service via the HTTP-protocol.

Bucket

You can compare the bucket to a folder in the file system. You place objects/files in your bucket. More than one bucket can be created to separate different data sets in one instance. No extra cost is added for a bucket.

Object

Objects are what files are to a traditional file system. Every object in a bucket needs to have a unique name. It becomes the object key. Objects can be retrieved using a web browser just like any other file on the web.

API

Amazon Simple Storage Service, usually called S3, isn't a standard for "object storage" per definition. There are several different implementations that all built upon the API. The S3 API is simply a regular REST-API.

A good reason for using GleSYS Object Storage is that it's built on this API. There are several software that can communicate with the service out of the box. There is no need to learn a new API.

If you want to develop your own software you can either use an existing client library or do your own HTTP requests to the API.

GleSYS Object storage is built with Ceph. You can read the whole API specification here

Fetching files

To fetch a file/object, that has public read access, you just need to go to it's URL. This makes it simple to link images and other media directly on a webpage. For example you can fetch the image "foo.png" in the bucket "bar" using the following URL https://objects.dc-sto1.glesys.net/bar/foo.png.

Access control

To manage what users can and can't do you can set up an Access Control List - ACL. Every bucket and object has an ACL as a subobject. An ACL contains what privileges a user group or a singel user have. You can create your own ACL or use a predefined ACL.

Read more about ACL here

Versioning

With versioning you can have multiple versions of an object. That way you can use versioning to retrieve previous versions of an object.

Metadata

With every object you can store metadata in a set of keys and values. One example of how to use metadata is to store the photographer's name for an uploaded image.

Pricing

You only pay for the storage you actually use. We charge nothing extra for bandwidth, number of API calls or transferred data.

The price is €0.06 /GB per month up to 500 TB. We can offer you a lower price if you want to store more than 500 TB. Please contact us for a quote.

Read more about GleSYS Object Storage