| I've built one of these several times for larger companies. They need a place to store millions of documents that integrates with their multiple existing internal systems. These documents would come in from fax, email or integration services. A benefit this has over cloud storage is that you can store your files across cloud vendors; so it would have cloud vendor redundancy. If Amazon goes down, it will pull files from Azure, and vice versa. This is a future feature if this gets any traction. Other things it might have over a cloud storage is you can assign tokens with different access levels, so your applications that need read only will be assigned read only tokens and your applications that need read/write can use read/write tokens. Larger customers that aren't interested in the cloud or are cloud averse with their sensitive documents can do a local install and have it store on a share inside their own network, so the method of storage is mutable; Azure, AWS, SMB, even FTP. You can also assign searchable metadata to each document, or upload a bunch of documents with the same metadata. So say you have a referral of some sort and it has 20 documents; you can upload all 20 and assign a meta tag as ReferralID: 123, then reference those documents in searches. There is also a built in file conversion. |
azure has secondary region built into their blob solution, which is essentially what you're describing. and considering your site has a bunch of moving parts (multi-cloud, file conversion, search, etc.), I'm not really convinced that you'll be more reliable than the cloud provider. in other words, you'll be the cause of downtime more often than s3 failing.
>Other things it might have over a cloud storage is you can assign tokens with different access levels, so your applications that need read only will be assigned read only tokens and your applications that need read/write can use read/write tokens.
aws/azure iam handles this.
>Larger customers that aren't interested in the cloud or are cloud averse with their sensitive documents can do a local install and have it store on a share inside their own network, so the method of storage is mutable; Azure, AWS, SMB, even FTP.
but there are many storage appliances (what you're essentially describing) out there, including open source ones like owncloud. what makes yours stand out?