Secure collaboration platform
Your IT project doesn’t start with a blank slate. There are storage systems, servers, private cloud management tools, log managers, backup tools, and more already deployed in the enterprise. ownCloud delivers choice. If storage can be mounted on Linux, ownCloud can use it – SAN, NAS, direct attached, virtual, software defined – whatever is needed. Further, with the ownCloud file system abstraction layer, API based storage, such as S3 or Swift compliant gateways are simple to integrate. And on the off chance a different object store interface is required, it can easily be added.
With ownCloud, you can also leverage storage that already exists; FTP, Swift, S3, Dropbox and more. Administrators can decide to store the most sensitive data on-premises and less sensitive data in the cloud while making all of your files available through a single interface and enabling compliance with your chosen security and governance policies.
To be compatible with as many backend storage systems as possible, ownCloud is designed to store all file metadata in the ownCloud database. This includes information like sharing activity, file IDs and more. For extremely large ownCloud instances, it can be more efficient to hand some of the file handling and metadata storage off to backend storage systems that support, for example, versions or file sharing. As the database is often a bottleneck in extremely large systems, offloading these activities and metadata from the database, performance improves, and the same hardware can scale to support even more users – particularly useful for extremely large instances.
Storage API
The new storage API not only offers better scalability, but it also enables ownCloud to leverage storage that has, until now, been unheard of in file access solutions – such as tape. In this manner, ownCloud can leverage the most cost-effective storage possible, while still providing employees, partners and suppliers the frictionless experience they seek in accessing their files.