AWS Case Study: Moonwalk

“Extending the solution to include an elastic storage capability was a natural evolution for Stanford,” stated Michael Harvey, VP Business Development at Moonwalk. “Given Amazon S3’s proven technology, price point and SLA, our decision to both recommend and integrate to Amazon S3 was easily made. In fact, Moonwalk first released support for Amazon S3 more than a year ago and we’ve continued to develop our offerings for this technology.”

Moonwalk’s integration with AWS S3 utilizes the proven and scalable Moonwalk Plug-in Architecture. The Moonwalk Columbia Gateway implements Moonwalk’s S3 Plug-in and allows any supported system to stream files to Amazon S3. Moonwalk uses a rolling key encryption method that ensures every object is encrypted on the fly – and each object is encrypted with a different key. From the moment the data stream is created from the source system, all objects are encrypted in transit and at target. Objects are automatically and transparently decrypted and restored on request.

For Harvey, Amazon S3 is the perfect elastic storage platform for an organization like Stanford. “More and more organizations are realizing that cloud-based solutions are a perfect fit to solve some very old IT challenges – and at a price point and service level that is impossible to ignore.”

Moonwalk allows for substantial reductions in storage expenditure, reduced risk of data loss and failure and accelerated Disaster Recovery by virtue of extensive data classification and prioritization. This first implementation at Stanford utilizing AWS will provide a “storage” cost of ownership reduction of more than 80%. This includes direct hardware and software costs, hardware and software maintenance, media costs, onsite tape storage, offsite tape storage, heating, cooling, electricity, and things like failover generators.

“The adoption of elastic storage at Stanford is a strategic development in achieving and maintaining a significantly improved data and security environment,” said Horace Greeley, Systems Group, Stanford University which works with Moonwalk on the implementation. “Our implementation highly leverages current state-of-the-art cost-effective technologies in an easily accessible and manageable framework.”

Moonwalk is a privately owned company specializing in large-scale data management solutions. Moonwalk is used by major organizations across the Banking, Healthcare, Government, Research and Development, Education and Aerospace industries. For more on Moonwalk, go to http://www.moonwalkinc.com/ .