Features and benefits

Features	Benefits
Leverages commodity hardware	No lock-in, lower price/GB.
HDD/node failure agnostic	Self-healing, reliable, data redundancy protects from failures.
Unlimited storage	Large and flat namespace, highly scalable read/write access, able to serve content directly from storage system.
Multi-dimensional scalability	Scale-out architecture: Scale vertically and horizontally-distributed storage. Backs up and archives large amounts of data with linear performance.
Account/container/object structure	No nesting, not a traditional file system: Optimized for scale, it scales to multiple petabytes and billions of objects.
Built-in replication 3✕ + data redundancy (compared with 2✕ on RAID)	A configurable number of accounts, containers and object copies for high availability.
Easily add capacity (unlike RAID resize)	Elastic data scaling with ease.
No central database	Higher performance, no bottlenecks.
RAID not required	Handle many small, random reads and writes efficiently.
Built-in management utilities	Account management: Create, add, verify, and delete users; Container management: Upload, download, and verify; Monitoring: Capacity, host, network, log trawling, and cluster health.
Drive auditing	Detect drive failures preempting data corruption.
Expiring objects	Users can set an expiration time or a TTL on an object to control access.
Direct object access	Enable direct browser access to content, such as for a control panel.
Realtime visibility into client requests	Know what users are requesting.
Supports S3 API	Utilize tools that were designed for the popular S3 API.
Restrict containers per account	Limit access to control usage by user.