RainStor in the Cloud

The advent of Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has delivered new ways of accessing computing resources while dramatically lowering costs. Cloud computing is changing the way IT departments service their business users and respond to ever changing market conditions. In an economy where doing more with less is an imperative, companies are looking to the cloud to make a major impact on their business and IT budgets.

Software as a Service (SaaS), pioneered successfully by companies such as salesforce.com, has proven to be a universally accepted and trusted way to access application functionality through a browser without the need to own or install costly hardware or software. The data is stored securely off site “in the cloud” and end users get the functionality they need with none of the IT burden. In the same way that applications have been offered “as a Service”, cloud computing makes other types of services possible through this cost-effective delivery mechanism.

RainStor enables companies to send inactive structured data to private containers in the cloud, where it can be searched and analyzed on demand using the reporting tools you use every day. Unlike traditional methods of storing and managing data on-premise, which are expensive and unwieldy, RainStor is low-cost and administration free.

Retain data in the cloud in 3 easy steps

RainStor’s unique data management technology can be combined with the power and security of cloud computing platforms such as Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to deliver cloud-based data retention solutions. RainStor can be used in the cloud with 3 easy steps:

1. Send – Structured data from any source is automatically compressed by 40x or more, encrypted and sent to the cloud using the RSloader client-side module. The extreme compression that is applied significantly reduces the time to transfer data securely to the cloud.

2. Store – The encrypted data is stored in RScontainers on cloud storage such as Amazon S3. These containers ensure the immutability of data and protect against modification of any kind. With unlimited extensible storage, containers can grow to be as large as needed.

3. Search – The data in the private containers can be searched and analyzed through the RSgateway running in the cloud using cloud compute resources such as Amazon EC2. The RSgateway allows data to be accessed through any industry-standard reporting or BI tools over ODBC or JDBC.