Elasticdrive

November 26, 2008 by leah

ElasticDrive allows you to mount a remote storage resource such as Amazon's Simple Storage Service (s3) as a local storage device.
The benefits of ElasticDrive is that you can have an infinitely large block device that can be mounted and used as a fast and secure remote backup storage resource. The block device can also be made into a RAID as well as used as part of a LVM volume (snapshotting) or even utilized via ISCSI. Because it is a block device, ElasticDrive automatically takes advantage of your OS's file caching schemes minimizing the network traffic between the web storage system and runs at near native speeds.

ElasticDrive acts as a server to serve read/write block operations to a remote storage resource. ElasticDrive uses the remote storage resource like a large sparse disk storing data as objects in adjustable chunks sizes (4k -64k in size) this saves you money by limiting remote read/write. Only complete blocks are written, if 4k is written, the system will cache and wait for the complete 64kb block before writing it to the remote storage systems.

This allows for users both locally within an external environment on other hosts such as VMware or virtual private servers (VPS) to use a remote storage system such as Amazon's S3 as a block device like any other local storage device formatting it with a filesystem of your choice (ext2, reiser, FAT, EXT3Cow) and mounting it to a directory.

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