What is our primary use case?
I am a solutions architect. MinIO is a public cloud type of storage that can attach external storage volume. I run it proprietary, or open-source. I use it to run a lot of test instances and production, spinning a new product out of it. In general, I use it for the S3 cloud storage capabilities.
Internally in our company, we have five people that use MinIO by putting their data in and heavily pound it for testing efforts.
How has it helped my organization?
With different types of storage, MinIO enables me to create these storage volumes called buckets, this is an S3 type cloud storage, I can attach these cloud buckets to different types of storage and actually create levels, or tiering of options of storage levels. If you were using Dropbox, I can attach a cloud storage volume to that Dropbox and it can be publicly shared as opposed to you having to do a file sync and share with basic storage.
What is most valuable?
The container installation features are good. The S3 feature provisions the storage buckets making it easy. It allows me to spin up the public buckets with open-source technology.
Another valuable feature of MinIO is Erasure Coding which is comparable to enterprise-based systems.
What needs improvement?
The MinIO dashboard is minimal as there are only a couple of features inside the dashboard for a basic user. I would like this to be more robust with more click-around features.
It is important that MinIO continues to increase its performance. With the increased scaling of specific research coding and the specific throughput the features currently work well, however they need to continue to maintain that community.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of MinIO is great. It is a software defined storage that will manage everything well if everything is configured and setup correctly.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
MinIO is very easy to scale as it is scale-out architecture. If I need more performance, more memory, or more discs I can add another virtual machine and it attaches to it nicely.
How are customer service and support?
MinIO is open source software. It is community based so its developed by the community.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I was using Amazon's S3 and nothing really seemed to work as well as this, until MinIO, the product is comparable. The main reason I switched to MinIO was that it is open source.
How was the initial setup?
Deployment of MinIO depends on what you are trying to accomplish. In my case, it is a four-node cluster with a minimum of four servers, and took myself, a senior cluster role, a full day. The biggest complexity is how you configure the storage around this. You can storage attach, which can get complicated making it an intermediate level of deployment.
What about the implementation team?
This solution is maintained in-house however, there are a lot of factors around that. MinIO manages disc failure, so you need to have hot spares of failing hard drives. You also need to maintain your operating system to make sure that the caching is running optimally and that you get your updates and patches on. Within MiniIO, I look at the caching between the discs. Sometimes you can have files that lock and are holding something up on a certain file.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
MinIO is open source so it is free.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Hitachi HCP is an option that I compared MinIO against.
What other advice do I have?
Our intention is to rollout MinIO as an enterprise, product offering, to customers. It will be part of a big ecosystem of cloud-based storage. If a company is coming off object storage, or if they were looking at Hitachi HCP be sure that you deploy with your Erasure coding and look into the caching configuration.
As far as functionality and stability on the backend of MinIO I would rate it an 8 out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other