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Comment by S3ForMe | Hacker News Reader

No, we use self-written software, this means that we can fix any issue or add additionally functionality very fast and do not depend on any vendor.

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Which is all well and good if you think you are better than the half-dozen proven open source systems (such as OpenStack Swift) that are in production on large public clouds.

Right now you are a unknown player with a unknown product running on top of a bargain-basement server provider.

I wish you the best of luck but I'll be surprised if you don't slam into a growth wall and have to raise prices.

Both Ceph (https://github.com/ceph/ceph) and Openstack Swift (https://github.com/openstack/swift) are open source, allowing you to add functionality and not be dependent on a vendor.

I'm sure you still have valid reasons why you rolled your own, and I would be interested in hearing about them.

Yes, of course we have our reasons. One of the most important are: - We didn't like internal storage implementation, we believe that we can do better. Very self-confident, I know, but I still think so after almost a year of development and production use. - Production deployment from the start required a lot of hardware investments, we decided to put these investments into development.

Personally I think that we made a right choice and I don't regret about it. We learned a lot about cloud storage, scalability, performance, possible problems and I believe that this knowledge is very important for every team who works in cloud storage business.

You write your own controller and disk drive firmware? (That's not a facetious question. That was the single biggest source of pain on the storage product I worked on at Sun, and that pain was usually extremely difficult to work around satisfactorily.)

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