CASE STUDY
Distributed Storage Solutions ( DSS ) is Australia ’ s largest provider of storage services for Filecoin – a decentralized cloud storage network developed on Interplanetary File System ( IPFS ) protocol with more than 14EB of committed capacity . IPFS is a protocol , hypermedia and file sharing peerto-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system .
Filecoin is a Blockchain-based cloud storage application , offering users an immutable record ( cryptographic proof ) of their data ’ s location and integrity . Filecoin allows users to store data at hyper competitive prices , with enterprise storage providers such as DSS , attracting customers based on their storage capacity , reliability and speed .
Users ’ data can be managed in several ways at their discretion . This includes replication in geographically diverse locations and / or distribution of a single dataset across multiple nodes on the network – resulting in no single point of failure .
These features make Filecoin an attractive alternative to traditional cloud storage services , especially for organizations with large storage needs and limited budgets . DSS sees this reflected in its own client base , made up of largely higher education , medical research , public sector and independent research organizations .
Running a successful storage provisioning operation on Filecoin has high hardware demands . DSS needs to support computationally intense operations and provide fast , high-performance and large-capacity storage . As DSS competes with hyperscale cloud providers for enterprise storage customers , the ability to guarantee reliable performance is key to success .
As DSS set out to establish itself as a trusted Filecoin storage provider , it needed a technology partner capable of delivering enterprise-grade data management solutions that met multiple requirements . The infrastructure needed to perform under the high demands of customer workloads and scale to multiple PBs per system , while remaining easy to monitor , maintain and manage .
As a start-up , DSS also needed to carefully consider the economics of procuring this hardware . The company was keen to find a flexible commercial model that would allow it to establish a high-performing infrastructure while avoiding large up-front costs .
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