Minio Tsunami is coming

Minio (www.minio.io), alternative player in the object storage wave with an open source approach, continues its community penetration with an even more comprehensive product. The IT Press Tour met Minio last year and we have measured great progress in last 12 months. The team is pretty small but really efficient and the model has proven that the community effect makes development and adoption faster and greater.

We anticipate a bigger “Gluster Wave” with Minio, just remember the number of downloads, deployments and users of Gluster in 2011, 5 years ago. Minio has already around 300K downloads and it’s growing fast, very fast. The partner community receives also a great adoption. And Gartner finally gave them the Cool Vendor 2016 label. With what we saw, we can reasonably expect same progress next year for our next session and The IT Press Tour has demonstrated again its indirect business development effect and visibility impact. Great.

Fast community adoption for Minio

Unlike the others, Minio, even if the team has founded the project after others, has decided without any doubt that the solution must offer one and only one object API interface with S3. From my opinion, suggested for several years, S3 is the de-facto standard winner, largely ahead from the community standard Swift or the industry standard CDMI. And please don’t make the confusion between object access API and object storage as a technology to build large cluster.

The second key choice made by Minio is the deployment strategy with containers and especially with Docker. It reinforces the flexibility and easy deployment capability of Minio, one key argument in favor of the product. The product is so easy to deploy and use that some competitors of Minio have adopted their command line interface, funny. In term of features, Minio has released an erasure coding approach implemented over 16 drives, fundamental when a storage solution must store and preserve huge volume of data potentially over a long period of time with high density drives – all these 3 criteria increase significantly the risk of losing data. For storage devices, Minio is clearly independent of device nature with NVMe/SSD, SAS/SATA, Ethernet Drive, RAID or JBOD. The company has also listed a few servers for reference and examples: SMC with Intel Atom, Cisco UCS, Quanta Grid – OCP Compliant – and Intel Server System and of course the software is open to much more configurations. Additionally, Continuously Mirror is a capability to apply changes incrementally and continuously between any S3 compatible storage service.

The product integrates also Lambda functions through event notifications service and supports Elasticsearch, Redis, PostgreSQL, AMQP, Kafka and Nats. All these confirm the #1 position of Minio in open source object storage momentum. This ends the phase 1 period and opens the phase 2 for 2017-2018 with a clear acceleration market adoption and the development and promotion of Minio X with a deep learning engine. It will be perfect for our next visit.

Impressive investors and board members

Minio leads clearly this open source object storage wave with others trying to follow but pretty far. Competitors have tried to copy, mimic and get inspired by Minio but culture and business model are tough to change and adapt. By the track records of founders, quality of investors and boards members, no need to make any comparison with some players who try to compete. Honestly no worries at all as they lack of funding, dev. resources or storage and distributed systems DNA. In 2017, Minio is definitely one of the open source storage software to follow closely, believe me… The Tsunami is coming and we start to see it…