Conceptual Framework

Zenko is designed to help administrators of large storage systems control, manage, replicate, and visualize data in a multi-cloud context.

Fundamental building blocks of Zenko’s replication framework are the bucket, the location, and the cloud service. End users (people or services) store data as files in buckets. Administrators are free to configure and name buckets as they please—to the admin, buckets are essentially tenants aggregated in a cloud storage deployment. From an end user’s perspective, a bucket simply appears as a networked storage location, for example, “accounting,” “bioinformatics-lab,” “daily-video-backup,” or any other organizational unit that makes sense.

Zenko fetches buckets from one location—a Scality RING private cloud, for example—and replicates them to designated cloud storage locations on other clouds. So, a company might store its data by departmental buckets to local cloud, then replicate that cloud storage location to several other public or private clouds for storage redundancy, rate-shopping, or other purposes. Zenko manages the complexities and discontinuities between the native Amazon S3 cloud storage protocol, and other popular cloud protocols, such as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure storage, and manages a unified namespace to retrieve data seamlessly from all managed cloud locations.

In addition to replication, Zenko provides bucket lifecycle management (expiration and transition) and other tools to manage data easily in a multi-cloud environment.