MinIO AIStor 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 AIStor. AIStor is now a separate binary from the MinIO Object Store. AIStor 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 AIStor. The MinIO Object Store remains the upstream offering and is licensed under AGPL v3:

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 AIStor 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. AIStor 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 AIStor but that will be a business discussion.

Let’s turn our attention to AIStor 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: MinIO Catalog 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: MinIO Firewall is purpose-built for the data. Unlike traditional firewalls which are IP-based or application-oriented, MinIO 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: MinIO Key Management Server is a highly available, operationally simple, KMS implementation. MinIO KMS solves the specific problem of dealing with billions of cryptographic keys that are required for per-object encryption. MinIO 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: MinIO Cache 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: MinIO 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. 

Console: Each of these features is managed by the new MinIO Console. The MinIO 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.