Features -------- Flexible, on demand and cost-effective cloud storage ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A key advantage in using Cloud storage is the unlimited physical storage constraint. Your own local volume that could be mounted trough NFS thanks to Cloud Gateway can bear as much data as you would like to store. No saturation issue, no evolution issue, ttal flexibility, it’s virtually infinite. And thanks to Cloud storage, you only pay for what you use. Your storage costs become fully flexible. You don’t need to invest in the acquisition of expensive storage solutions of several Tera-Bytes which will be under-used. No more storage limit and your storage costs is directly related to your need for expanded / reduced storage. No API, no development, no vendor lockup ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Using Cloud Gateway means there is no initial investment in API integration. Moving to Cloud storage is only a few clicks away without modifying the way your application is functioning in any way = Time & Cost Efficiency. The choice of Cloud storage providers is yours ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Once connected via Cloud Gateway, no source code modification of your software is required to integrate a proprietary API, therefore you keep your freedom. Switching Cloud storage provider is up to you and only one click away. You can also change back to a traditional local storage avoiding any technical issue. You are totally independent and are able to use competitive tension amongst providers to obtain best possible terms on your data storage. No lock-up through a proprietary API ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Your own storage local volume is mounted through NFS (Network File System) or CIFS (Common Internet File System) on your own platform as though your storage is dealt with locally on your own network. Re-internalisation of your data is possible at any time without any technical or commercial difficulty. Openness ^^^^^^^^ All data are retained in a fully transparent, accessible and documented format. You will choose our products because they are the best out there and not because you are stuck with them! The Cloud Gateway concept is designed to release Cloud storage users from proprietary API and offer a standardised interface POSIX compatible which is accessible via standard and tested protocols such as FUSE, NFS or CIFS. Bearing this in mind, our products do not include a proprietary API and are fully based on standard protocols. Our philosophy is to offer end users a maximum level of control on the product through a number of fully flexible and configurable parameters: - Compression levels ; - Encryption algorithms ; - Optimal operation size (IO Block Size) ; - Timeouts duration at various levels (database access, HTTP(S) transfers etc. All our configuration files are in XML format so as to be easily readable by a person as well as easily handled via scripts or external programs. These file formats are documented and are therefore unsurprisingly standard. Because we are aware our products and services are to be used in complex environments, our products are designed to be able to interact with various classic monitoring tools such as Munin or Nagios. High availability ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Nuage Labs team is composed of highly trained engineers with a long experience in complex architecture management with high availability constraints. This is why our products are designed with the dual objective of offering robustness, monitoring and fail-over systems in order to guarantee service continuity at all times. .. image:: images/cloud-gateway-redundancy.png :alt: High-Availability with Cloud Gateway The active / passive mode from Cloud Gateway, linked with a mirroring functionality from two separate Cloud storage providers offers an architecture without a point of failure [5]_. Integrity ~~~~~~~~~ Because we know your data are your most valuable asset, we have integrated various encryption mechanisms within our solutions in order to assess data integrity during data exchange with storage providers. When your provider’s technology allow it, we check data integrity by default as and when data are placed on the provider’s platform by comparing the imprint before data are sent to the Cloud, with the one recorded by the storage provider (usually MD5 format). We would also typically check data integrity when recovering the file from the storage provider. The way your data are stored is simple, transparent and documented allowing you to repatriate them, should you choose to stop using our service. Confidentiality ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Cloud Gateway can ensure files confidentiality at all times during data transfers to the Cloud storage provider as well as during storage through a strong specific encryption based on tried and tested algorithms. Should you wish to, data transfers can be entirely performed via HTTPS and files can be encrypted at a level satisfying your own requirements: - AES 128 bits ; - AES 192 bits ; - AES 256 bits ; - Blowfish 128 bits ; - Camellia 128 bits ; - Camellia 192 bits ; - Camellia 256 bits. Cloud Gateway supports the most secure standards of SSL/TLS to secure your transfers, like TLS 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2, Perfect Forward Secrecy and Elliptic Curves. File encryption is always done on the basis of block chains (Cipher Bloc Chaining or CTR Integer Counter Mode) with a salt and a unique and randomly generated initialization vector (IV) in order to guarantee a robust level of confidentiality. The encryption key is known only by you. Nuage Labs does not have access to your data and should you activate the data encryption, neither does the Cloud storage provider. Efficiency ~~~~~~~~~~ A question often raised on data accessibility through the Cloud is performance limitation while accessing files stored online. Cloud Gateway solves this key issue, integrating a cache mechanism to its solution. Although caches performance mostly depend on the equipment on which they are deployed as well as the allocated size, our team is proud to confirm that access performance are highly improved compared to a direct Cloud storage (access to files not being dependent upon DNS or HTTP(S) requests and not being constrained by bandwidth between your application and the Cloud storage provider. According to data storage typology, our compression system as integrated to Cloud Gateway can reach factors close to 95%. The level of compression can easily be configured balancing out the quantity of space used at the storage provider level, data access time and CPU and memory charge available on your platform. In order to avoid classic bottlenecks, Cloud Gateway uses an asynchronous event internal architecture with a low number of processes. Each process is dedicated to its own task with a separate addressable memory and is monitored by a parent process whose sole role is to ensure other processes are correctly run. The asynchronous architecture enables to avoid almost all drawbacks from a number of processes such as: - thundering herd ; - lock contention ; - c10k problem. The strict task slicing enables to limit modules and locks dependency allowing to fully benefit from modern multi-cores architectures. .. [5] Single Point of Failure, or SPoF