Nextcloud announces Global Scale architecture as part of Nextcloud 12

May 22 2017, Stuttgart, Germany. Nextcloud GmbH, the leading global supplier of open source enterprise sync and share communication technology, announces its groundbreaking Global Scale architecture. Where existing private cloud technologies are hard to scale beyond tens to hundreds of thousands of users, Nextcloud Global Scale, developed in close collaboration with several European universities including the collaborative of Danish universities (DeiC), delivers a true globally scalable solution for deployments with hundreds of millions of users and enables existing customers to achieve large cost savings by moving to decentralized storage solutions.

Nextcloud continues to deliver impressive innovations

said Florian Hausleitner, Senior IT System Engineer Datacenter Services at Raiffeisen Informatik Center Steiermark.

With GS, Nextcloud drives efficiency for cost-effective private cloud deployments to service internal and external customers which can be utilized while extending the service on a large scale.

Nextcloud Global Scale (GS) enables virtually limitless scalability of existing and new Nextcloud deployments at high cost efficiency by transparently distributing users across multiple nodes. GS takes away the need for a central database, storage and cache solution, enabling individual nodes to take advantage of inexpensive commodity hardware to save costs and increase flexibility. GS consists of three main components:

• The nodes are accessed by users through the Global Site Selector (GSS) which redirect the user to the node their data currently resides on.
• Sharing is mediated through the Lookup Server (LS) which is queried by internal or external share requests and resolves the current location of the shared data. The LS also is responsible for tracking storage and quota settings as well as Quality of Service metrics like speed and reliability class and the physical location of users.
• The final component of GS is the Balancer which is responsible for monitoring the load of individual nodes and initiating the migration of users between nodes based on QoS settings and changes in physical location of users.

With Global Scale, Nextcloud moves the goal posts for efficient, highly scalable and easy to deploy and extend enterprise file sync and share solutions

said Frank Karlitschek, Managing Director at Nextcloud GmbH

By automatically moving user data between nodes to achieve an optimal balance between legal requirements, costs and Quality of Service, GS removes traditional, costly scalability limitations like data center uplink, load balancers and database, storage and cache.

Our university partners estimate that 60 to 80% of the costs of a typical large scale self hosted file sync and share solution are associated with the storage solution itself. Distributing storage over independent storage systems and allowing them to be globally distributed to service users locally improves both cost efficiency and Quality of Service. The smaller size of nodes enables easier automated deployment using container technologies and simplifies backup and High Availability strategies. These in turn decrease required maintenance efforts, optimizing Total Cost of Ownership on multiple levels.

Global Scale also delivers a new generation of federation to the Nextcloud ecosystem, enabling users to migrate between providers or self hosted solutions and more effectively share data and metadata like file activity between distributed instances.

With the Nextcloud 12 release, Nextcloud continues to deliver on strong industry demand, increasing its significant technical lead in the area of open source enterprise file sync and share solutions.

About Nextcloud

Nextcloud offers an industry-leading fully open source solution for on-premises data handling and communication with an uncompromising focus on security and privacy and unprecendented scalability. Nextcloud brings together universal access to data with next-generation secure communication and collaboration capabilities under direct control of IT and integrated with existing compliant infrastructure. Nextcloud’s open, modular architecture, emphasis on security and advanced federation capabilities enable modern enterprises to leverage their existing assets within and across the borders of their organization. For more information, visit https://nextcloud.com or follow @Nextclouders on Twitter.

Links:
About Nextcloud: nextcloud.com/about
Global Scale announcement: Nextcloud announces Global Scale architecture as part of Nextcloud 12
Global Scale web page with white paper: nextcloud.com/globalscale
Global Scale explainer video: YouTube
Nextcloud 12 availability announcement: Welcome to Nextcloud 12!
Earlier blog for the beta with full feature overview, screenshots and videos: Nextcloud 12 Beta Introduces the Next Generation of Secure Collaboration
Blog by Nextcloud founder Frank Karlitschek on opensource.com on the vision behind Nextcloud 12: The next big challenge for open source: rich collaboration software

Press contacts
Nextcloud GmbH
Jos Poortvliet
Kronenstraße 22A
D-70173 Stuttgart, Germany
e-mail: pr@nextcloud.com