# Features and benefits

Features | Benefits
--- | ---
Leverages commodity hardware | No lock-in, lower price/GB.
HDD/node failure agnostic | Self-healing, reliable, data redundancy protects from failures.
Unlimited storage | Large and flat namespace, highly scalable read/write access, able to serve content directly from storage system.
Multi-dimensional scalability | Scale-out architecture: Scale vertically and horizontally-distributed storage. Backs up and archives large amounts of data with linear performance.
Account/container/object structure | No nesting, not a traditional file system: Optimized for scale, it scales to multiple petabytes and billions of objects.
Built-in replication 3✕ + data redundancy (compared with 2✕ on RAID) | A configurable number of accounts, containers and object copies for high availability.
Easily add capacity (unlike RAID resize) | Elastic data scaling with ease.
No central database | Higher performance, no bottlenecks.
RAID not required | Handle many small, random reads and writes efficiently.
Built-in management utilities | Account management: Create, add, verify, and delete users; Container management: Upload, download, and verify; Monitoring: Capacity, host, network, log trawling, and cluster health.
Drive auditing | Detect drive failures preempting data corruption.
Expiring objects | Users can set an expiration time or a TTL on an object to control access.
Direct object access | Enable direct browser access to content, such as for a control panel.
Realtime visibility into client requests | Know what users are requesting.
Supports S3 API | Utilize tools that were designed for the popular S3 API.
Restrict containers per account | Limit access to control usage by user.

this page last updated: 2025-11-03 12:55:44

Except where otherwise noted, this document is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. See all OpenStack Legal Documents.

found an error? report a bug