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.

Features

  • ElasticDrive does not use proprietary device drivers.
  • Simple and Easy to install. - Get up and running in minutes.
  • FUSE - A FUSE based file system using a remote storage system as backend store.
  • Network Block Device - NBD driver works with mdadm and ext3 filesystems, and persistent mounts. That means that the mdadm /dev/md0 device recovers spontaneously from network downage.
  • Infinite capacity disk  - Partitions can grow!
  • Local disk speed - Write through double caching
  • ISCSI, EXT3, mdadm Compliant
  • Remount file system on ANY machine including virtual machines.
  • On-demand recovery - Server dies, or taken offline the system can easily be restored.
  • Hot pluggable hard drive for Linux
  • Multicast communication and caching of network traffic for scalability and reduced costs
  • Copy-on-write functionality
  • Snapshot support, where the image only represents changes made to an underlying disk image
  • Distributed Raid Array - ElasticDrive RAID  devices redundant and provide fault tolerance from disk errors and single disk failure. On failure, the array continues to operate so long as at least one drive is functioning
  • Logical volume management (LVM) - Concatenate, stripe together or combine partitions into larger virtual ones that can be resized or moved.
  • Useable as raw block devices just as disk partitions are: mountable file systems can be created on them, or they can be used as swap storage.
  • Future Proof -  Amazon S3, AOL Xdrive, Google Gdrive, Microsoft LiveDrive, or YahooDrive. It doesn't matter, your data can be written any storage system now or in the future. We're just waiting for someone to invent it
  • Linux supported, BSD and Mac OS X coming soon!

0.4.2 improvements

New Improvements and Additions include;

 * DATACENTER TARGETING! You can now specify the EU datacenter for storage.
 * TTL specification, to set how long cache entries are stored. This allows you to maintain the READ cache for a longer time in order to improve performance.
 * ElasticDrive now has an ordered write engine which ensures that data is always written to disk in the correct order. This engine is the s3simple storage engine.  If you want more performance, you can now RAID multiple elasticdrives in parallel (RAID0). The old s3 fast engine has been removed.
 * At the request of one of our customers, ElasticDrive now supports gzip encoding on your stripes; which gives a significant speed (and cost) improvement for a lot of use cases.
 * ElasticDrive also has preliminary support for the tcp_window_scaling option, which increases window size for much faster transfers. We expect this one to grow legs as Amazon pushes window scaling into production. This option is currently in testing at Amazon, and is not recommended for production use.
 * SSL can be turned on and off at will with the no_ssl option. Good for higher speed and lower CPU usage transfers.
 * CPU usage is much, much lower.
 * ElasticDrive's new caching algorithm is simpler, smaller, and faster for data reads.
 * ElasticDrive now comes with the ed_bucket_mgr tool for listing your buckets, and deleting the ones you are no longer using. Useful for cleaning out file-systems that you are no longer using.
* A lower priced 50GB version is now available for $49