Zettar® ZCloud is a HTTP and a client that is purposely built to provide big data mobility and access.

It's a server for RESTful clients of AWS S3 compatible cloud storage services. Itself can function as a client to such services executing specific data moving tasks. Thus, we will often qualify this part of zcloud as a "data transfer client" to distinguish it from a regular full-featured client or one designed for interactive use.

It provides its own independent scale-out and high-availability (HA) with a BitTorrent®-alike P2P sub-system. ZCloud can scale from a single to hundreds of nodes seamlessly. Thus, adding ZCloud to a storage infrastructure doesn't introduce any single point of failure (SPOF). It provides RESTful APIs and thus is a platform. The following figure illustrates the platform's main benefits.

With its concurrent plus asynchronous data processing and P2P capabilities, ZCloud can carry out multiple data transfers in parallel at both per instance and the cluster level, resulting high big data transfer performance.

The platform is vendor-agnostic - running on either commodity hardware or commercial storage systems. It comes as a compact Linux software package, consisting of just a single compiled executable and a few textual files. The package can be readily deployed on an existing or new server/storage infrastructure using a server-less configuration management system or an established counterpart. Simplicity in deployment, operation, maintenance, and usage has always been a key ZCloud design focus.

As a HTTP server and data transfer client, ZCloud itself doesn't store any data. Instead, it uses a NAS cluster, a SAN, and/or a distributed file system as its storage backend.

ZCloud provides big data mobility as needed among devices, sites (aka clusters), and a public storage cloud service that provides AWS S3 compatible RESTful APIs. It thus can be a basis for data backup, archiving, migration, one or multi-way data sync, and replication. All such tasks are made easy with the built-in RESTful control APIs, which facilitates both ad-hoc and scheduled, automated data transfer tasks. The RESTful control APIs can be accessed with both Web UI and CLI tools.

Other than enabling big data mobility, ZCloud also provides accesses to such data. Being a HTTP-based platform, ZCloud readily enables RESTful intranet data access to boost mobile work-force's productivity.

Furthermore, together with the underlying storage backend, the combination results a highly AWS S3 compatible RESTful storage service on an intranet (aka a private storage cloud) - supporting local RESTful cloud application accesses.

The following table summarises ZCloud's main features and their benefits:

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