The Enterprise Object Storage Feature Set

With so much product goodness coming out at once today we thought it would make sense to craft a quick summary post of all of the changes we have made and all of the features we have introduced. Let’s start from the top. 

MinIO now has two product binaries, the MinIO Enterprise Object Store and the MinIO Object Store. The MinIO Enterprise Object Store is now a separate binary from the MinIO Object Store. The Enterprise Object Store carries a commercial license and has a suite of new features that we detail below and in individual blog posts. There are two SLA options available for the Enterprise Object Store. The MinIO Object Store remains the upstream offering and is licensed under AGPL v3:

MinIO Enterprise Object Store Plus is designed for large-scale deployments of MinIO (1PiB+). The entire suite of Enterprise features is available as is an exceptional SLA (<4 hour, unlimited use of the Panic Button) and numerous other benefits (indemnification, architecture and security reviews to name a few). 

MinIO Enterprise Object Store Lite is designed for smaller deployments of MinIO (200 TiB up to 1PiB). This offering includes the entire suite of features in the Enterprise Object Store tier but the SLA for support is not as robust as the Enterprise tier. 

MinIO Object Store is designed for the open source community who are building open source applications in compliance with the GNU AGPL v3 license and are able to support themselves. If you distribute, host or create derivative works of the MinIO Object Store software over the network, the GNU AGPL v3 license requires that you also distribute the complete, corresponding source code of the combined work under the same GNU AGPL v3 license. This requirement applies whether or not you modified the MinIO Object Store.

The unit price for the Enterprise Object Store is based on capacity. It costs $.02 per GB per month. Discounts accrue quickly north of a PB. Feel free to look at the pricing calculator for more information. The Enterprise Object Store is available immediately to new customers. They can request a POC license key on our download page or reach out to us at hello@min.io. 

For existing customers, there is no change today. No change to the pricing, no change to the SLA. They will have the option to upgrade to the Enterprise Object Store but that will be a business discussion.

Let’s turn our attention to those Enterprise features. They are game changers for large-scale data infrastructure – the type demanded by modern AI workloads. They are only available in the Enterprise tier and there is no additional charge for them. They cannot be purchased separately. 

Catalog: The MinIO Enterprise Catalog feature solves the problem of object storage namespace and metadata search. Using the catalog, operators can index, organize and search a vast number of objects using the familiar and blazingly fast GraphQL interface. It allows administrators to know exactly what is going on with their data for any number of governance, audit, compliance or related tasks – all in real time. 

Firewall: The MinIO Enterprise Firewall feature is purpose-built for the data. Unlike traditional firewalls which are IP-based or application-oriented, the Enterprise Firewall is designed for the scale of an object store with the awareness of S3 to facilitate rules that make sense for the enterprise administrator from TLS termination, load balancing, access control and QOS capabilities at object level granularity.

Key Management System: The MinIO Enterprise Key Management Server is a highly available, operationally simple, KMS implementation. The Enterprise KMS solves the specific problem of dealing with billions of cryptographic keys that are required for per-object encryption. MinIO’s Enterprise KMS can deliver predictable behavior, even at the scale of hundreds of thousands of cryptographic operations per node per second while delivering high availability and fault tolerance. It supports multi-tenancy enabling each tenant to be assigned its own enclave which is completely independent and isolated from all other enclaves on the KMS cluster.

Cache: The MinIO Enterprise Cache feature operates as a caching service that uses server DRAM memory to create a distributed shared cache for ultra high-performance workloads. Purpose-built for MinIO object storage, applications requesting objects don’t have to do anything; it will just work once enabled or configured. This is a key feature in the world of AI where GPUs should never starve. 

Observability: The MinIO Enterprise Observability suite is a complete, data infrastructure-centric collection of metrics, audit logs, error logs and traces. This allows administrators to view all system components (OS, CPU, memory, drives, network) across every instance, cluster and erasure code set. It really has to be seen to be appreciated. It enables a single administrator to manage exabytes of infrastructure. 

Enterprise Console: Each of these features is managed by the new Enterprise Console. The Enterprise Console serves as a single pane of glass for all the organization's instances of MinIO including public clouds, private clouds, edge and colo instances. This enables enterprise customers of MinIO to manage (deploy, configure, upgrade and monitor) large-scale, technologically and geographically diverse storage infrastructure from a single, intuitive location. 

We are excited about what these features mean for large-scale data infrastructure, for operational agility, for security and for delivering the performance required for AI/ML workloads at the scale those workloads require. Needless to say, if you have questions, please reach out to us at hello@min.io or hit us on the Ask the Expert button.