Storj Architects and Delivers the Edge

Storj is the distributed storage cloud, acquiring and partnering to deliver an enterprise grade platform with an M&E/AI capable edge tech stack.

Storj is the leading distributed storage solution with 25,000+ endpoints in 100 countries around the world. This data fabric is designed so that there is no dependency on any one node, site or data center. Both the data and metadata are sharded and distributed. The Storj edge ecosystem delivers for Edge/AI.

What Does Storj Deliver?

Decentralization and Security

• Storj.io leverages a decentralized network of storage nodes, which splits and encrypts files before distributing them across multiple locations. This reduces the risk of data breaches since no single node holds an entire file, ensuring enhanced privacy and security.

Cost-Effective Storage

• Compared to traditional cloud storage services, Storj.io offers competitive pricing due to its decentralized nature. The platform allows users to pay only for the storage and bandwidth they use, offering affordable rates that can be as much as 80% lower than centralized cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure.

High Availability and Redundancy

• Storj.io ensures high data availability through redundancy, meaning data is replicated across multiple nodes. Even if some nodes go offline, the system can quickly rebuild data from the remaining pieces, providing robust data reliability without relying on a single point of failure.

Scalability

• As a decentralized platform, Storj.io can scale quickly and efficiently without the need for building or maintaining large data centers. Its global network of nodes grows organically as more users contribute resources, making it ideal for on-demand scalability without infrastructure limits.

Data Privacy and Ownership

• Storj.io empowers users with complete ownership and control over their data. Since files are encrypted end-to-end and only the user holds the encryption keys, no intermediary, including Storj itself, can access the content of the data, ensuring user privacy.

Where Does Storj Deliver?

EVERY major industry has use cases for Edge and Multisite Data. Storj delivers at over 25,000 nodes around the world. These nodes live on heterogeneous infrastructure in many clouds and data centers, making them highly resilient to threat vectors.

Industry Use Cases

Storj and its partners have had great success in a range of industries including Media and Entertainment and AI-enabled capabilities.

Media and Entertainment

• Video Use Cases and content distribution

Storj is ideal for storing and distributing large media files such as video, audio, and images. Its decentralized nature provides fast, scalable, and cost-effective storage, making it useful for video streaming platforms, content creators, and media companies. The platform’s global network ensures fast content delivery to users across the world with built-in redundancy and availability.

Backup and Archival Solutions

• Data backup and long-term archiving

Businesses can use Storj as an S3 storage behind Backup Software Solutions. Its reliable, secure, and cost-effective storage for backups can use Storj as a distributed backup solution. Its redundancy and geo-replication features make it ideal for disaster recovery and long-term data archival, reducing the risk of data loss and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements for data retention.

Healthcare and Life Sciences

• Secure storage of medical records and research data

The healthcare industry requires secure and compliant storage for sensitive data, including medical records, imaging files, and research data. Storj’s end-to-end encryption and decentralized architecture provide a HIPAA-compliant solution for storing patient information, ensuring privacy and data security while maintaining easy access for healthcare providers and researchers.

Energy/Utilities

• Edge Data Capture/Cache/Store

For thousands of endpoints where realtime data capture, storage and in place analytics, the ecosystem of edge data capture plus caching plus Storj origin storage delivers performance, availability and security.

Blockchain and Web3 Applications

• Decentralized application (dApp) data storage

For blockchain-based applications and Web3 projects, Storj offers decentralized and censorship-resistant storage for smart contracts, NFT metadata, and other application data. Its architecture aligns with the decentralized ethos of the blockchain, providing reliable and distributed storage for dApp developers and crypto projects.

Enterprise IT and DevOps

• Storing and distributing software artifacts and logs

Storj is an excellent solution for DevOps teams and IT departments that need to manage and store large volumes of data, including application logs, software artifacts, and containers. Storj provides fast and scalable storage, ensuring continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines run smoothly, with low storage costs and easy global data distribution.

For Those Who Would Like to Know: How Does Storj Work?

Storj Edge Services are hosted components that provide S3 compatibility and publicly-available data sharing services and are composed of the Storj Gateway MT, the auth service and the link sharing service. Storj Edge Services use server-side encryption.

Edge Services enable applications to store data on the Storj service via an S3 compatible API, handling encryption and erasure coding, where files are split into redundant pieces that are then distributed across storage nodes. Each of the pieces is stored on different, diverse storage nodes, configured in multiple servers, racks, rooms, facilities, etc. yielding significant performance, durability, and security advantages. Uplink clients include both a self-hosted single tenant and multi-tenant S3 compatible gateways, the CLI, and the libuplink Go library and bindings.

Let's Click Into The Details

Data redundancy on the network is achieved primarily using erasure codes. Erasure coding is a means of data protection in which data is broken into pieces, where each piece is expanded and encoded with redundant data. The pieces are then stored across a set of different storage locations to reduce the risk of data loss due to the loss of any one data location.

An erasure code is often described as a ratio of two numbers, k and n. If a block of data is encoded with a k, n erasure code, there are n total generated erasure shares, where only any k of them are required to recover the original block of data. It doesn’t matter if you recover all of the even numbered shares, all of the odd numbered shares, the first k shares, the last k shares, etc. Any k shares can recover the original block.

The Storj public network uses an erasure code scheme of l = 39 / k=29/ m=54/ o=65/ n=110.

Erasure Code l

[This is the number of pieces an uplink will attempt to download when downloading a segment. The uplink will cut off any piece downloads after k pieces have been downloaded. The uplink attempts to download more pieces than needed to eliminate the long tail effect of dependency on the slowest storage node.]

Erasure Code k

[This is the number of pieces required to recreate a segment. Any k number of the pieces of a segment can be used to reconstitute a segment]

Erasure Code m

[This is the repair threshold. It is the minimum number of pieces that will be stored for a segment assuming the loss of pieces due to storage node failures over time. The satellite audits storage nodes on an ongoing basis and keeps track of the number of healthy pieces stored on the network for every segment. If a segment drops below m pieces, the satellite downloads k pieces in an encrypted state, regenerates the specific missing pieces using the Berlecamp Welch algorithm, then distributes them over new storage nodes.]

Erasure Code n

The number of pieces an uplink attempts to upload to diverse storage nodes when uploading a segment. The uplink will attempt n pieces and cut off any piece uploads after o pieces have been uploaded. The uplink attempts to upload more pieces than needed to eliminate the long tail effect of dependency on the slowest storage node.

Erasure Code o

[The maximum number of pieces actually stored for a segment at time of upload.]

Segment Size

[Objects larger than one segment are first broken into segments of this size. Segments are then encrypted, erasure-encoded and distributed for storage.]

Table 1. Erasure code scheme definitions

Segment, Shard, Distribute and Reassemble Objects

When a file is uploaded, it’s first encrypted by the Uplink Gateway using an encryption key generated at the Satellite and held by that client. Next, it’s erasure-coded, meaning it’s broken up into at least n pieces, of which only k (any k) are required to reconstitute a file. (The redundancy from erasure coding is more efficient than replicating files and this technology is used by many data storage systems.)

The Uplink Gateway then contacts the satellite to get a list of Storage Nodes on which to store the pieces. The Satellite returns n Storage Node addresses. The Uplink Gateway attempts to upload n pieces peer-to-peer, in parallel, directly to the Storage Nodes. The Uplink Gateway stops attempting to upload pieces once o pieces have been successfully uploaded to at least o Storage Nodes.

The Uplink Gateway attempts n - o extra pieces during the upload process to eliminate any long-tail effect and the related latency from the slowest Storage Nodes.

When the Uplink Gateway downloads a file, it’s essentially the same process as an upload but in reverse. The Uplink Gateway requests a file from the Satellite and the Satellite returns a list of more than k Storage Nodes from which the Uplink Gateway can retrieve the pieces of the file. The Uplink Gateway starts attempting to download pieces from all the Storage Nodes provided, again, stopping once it has retrieved the k pieces needed to reconstitute the file after eliminating latency from the long-tail effect. The pieces are re-encoded and then decrypted by the Uplink Gateway as only it has the encryption key

Is Storj Easy To Use?

In a word, YES. In as little as one day, you can subscribe and integrate Storj as your origin storage.

Integration Partners?

With www.valdi.ai and www.cudos.org, you have partners that can deliver leading edge enterprise grade scale-out computing and storage capabilities for AI, Blockchain and Edge Solutions. As part of the Storj ecosystem, Valdi provides rentable on demand GPUs anywhere for Video Processing and AI LLM processing workloads, and Cudos streamlines data compatibility and converts files to objects.

The Storj Ecosystem

So, now you know the technology, the industries and use cases and how Storj and its ecosystem of acquisitions and partners deliver at the edge with performance, security and scale. Storj is easy to use, quickly achieve ROI results, increase availability and performance of your workflows and do it securely and safely.

Reach out for more info:

Deal Daly, Advisor and Consultant to Stori.io

[email protected]