Connectria Launches Amazon S3 Cloud Clone

Published: November 29, 2011

by Alex Woodie

The data center and cloud hosting company Connectria this month launched a new cloud storage solution that uses an API that's compatible with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), enabling companies to move their Amazon S3 storage to Connectria without big changes to business processes--and possibly saving them money.

Since it launched in 2006, Amazon S3 has become an extremely popular storage mechanism for entire websites, images, and computer backups. According to Amazon, at the end of June, S3 stored more than 449 billion objects and processed up to 290,000 requests per second.

However, some people may not be comfortable with the ways in which Amazon charges for S3. Amazon charges not only based on the amount of data stored, but also on the bandwidth used and the number of SQL requests (PUT, COPY, POST, GET, or LIST) that a customer makes with its S3 buckets.

Connectria is hoping to capitalize on any ill sentiment toward Amazon S3's pricing scheme with its new Connectria Cloud Storage (CCS), which the company claims is cheaper and more reliable than Amazon S3.

Connectria is charging $14.99 per month for the first 100 GB of storage and 100 GB of data transfer bandwidth. By comparison, Amazon charges about $13.30 per month for the first GB of storage and an additional $9.63 for 100 GB of data transfers. Connectria does not charge for any SQL requests.

According to Connectria's comparisons of S3 and CCS costs, Amazon is only slightly more expensive than CCS for the first 1 TB of storage and data transfer, but is about 40 percent more expensive when handling 4 TB of data and transfers.

And thanks to a RESTful API that's compatible with Amazon S3, CCS is a drop-in replacement for Amazon S3. Any tools that customers use to move data in Amazon S3 should work out-of-the-box with Connectria's new offering. A DNS name change is the only meaningful tweak a user must make to begin using the new service.

IBM i shops who are using Amazon S3 to store their backups could also use CCS. Since 2009, Kisco Information Systems has sold an IBM i utility called i2S3 that directs IBM i backups to S3. There's no reason why i2S3 couldn't point to CCS instead.

Connectria president and CEO Rich Waidmann says CCS provides "a compelling alternative to Amazon S3" and is a fraction of the price of SAN, NAS, or data backup solutions. He also said CCS complements Connectria's cloud hosting service, which include IBM i-based clouds.

For more information, see www.connectria.com.

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