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.
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.
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.
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.
The stability of MinIO is great. It is a software defined storage that will manage everything well if everything is configured and setup correctly.
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.
MinIO is open source software. It is community based so its developed by the community.
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.
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.
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.
MinIO is open source so it is free.
Hitachi HCP is an option that I compared MinIO against.
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.
We are vendors. We sell products to customers.
Quantum has a lot of storage, we are selling object storage.
The performance is good.
The technology is stable which is good.
We would like to see a self-sufficient installation.
Nowadays it's open-source, but the installation is still tied to the vendor, which means it is unlikely that it is going to scale.
I want them to tap into the broader community. It is really emerging, they have a year over year, 50% annual growth.
With a 10-year-old company, it will certainly bring a lot of interest, and will certainly make it more successful, if they tap into that growing customer base.
They have to make themselves relevant to the industry. The industry is totally geared to the Cloud, DevOps, and geared for agility.
The software with the appliance in my set is already outdated, and it is not that it cannot sell, but it has to be tapping into the emerging and growing sectors to continue with the customers and businesses. This is what the requirement is, to improve their technology.
Which means that they have to make themselves relevant to the industry.
The company has been providing Quantum ActiveScale for over a year.
We provide any versions they have.
Quantum ActiveScale is a reliable solution. We have not had any issues with bugs or glitches. We work with Quantum and they certify it.
It scales up. It's a scalable product.
Our customers are small, medium, and large business.
We have not contacted technical support yet.
The setup is very complex. it took 18 hours for the first setup.
Deployment is a big thing. Deployment makes it easy.
Easy deployment is a major factor.
Quantum ActiveScale is open-source.
The biggest advantage to purchasing object storage is the company is a global company with global support and sales network. When you compare with other object storage products, at best they are approximately $75 million and can barely survive in the U.S, and I am not referring to a global support network.
If you are a customer, a large enterprise you would prefer to work with someone who is going to be there for a long time, rather than someone who comes and goes. In the open-source space, we see them come and go a lot, such as Ceph, and Hadoop. Those companies come and go.
You really need to be serious about the vendor and how long the vendor is going to be there with you.
Quantum is at least 10 times larger than all other object storage vendors with the advantage of not going away overnight.
I would rate Quantum ActiveScale a seven out of ten.
I wouldn't rate them high because I want to see them improve.
