LucidLink
Simplifying Distributed File Accessibility

With relentless growth of data, enterprises are shifting toward adopting cloud object storage because of its cost effective, durable, elastic, and highly scalable nature. However, latency remains a huge challenge for distributed teams collaborating on projects utilizing large data sets, significantly denting the process workflow. Traditional network protocols such as NFS, CIFS and SMB, that are often utilized for file access in the cloud are more suitable for local file sharing as they have not been designed with internet-scale in mind. San Francisco, CA-based LucidLink is on a mission to allow geographically distributed teams to efficiently access AWS S3 as production storage. LucidLink makes object storage as simple and efficient as accessing files on a local system.

LucidLink streams files from AWS S3 directly without the need to download or synchronize them, improving process efficiency. To begin using LucidLink’s service, users simply sign into the AWS marketplace, choose their preferred region, and provide their own encryption keys. Their shared file space appears as a folder embedded in the local operating system. “With us, any application process or workflow can access data as if stored locally. In other words, simply mount S3 as a file system,” says Peter Thompson, co-founder and CEO, LucidLink.

The company’s distributed file system is delivered as a service thereby saving customers from unnecessary investment on infrastructure. Furthermore, the company enhances file access performance through advanced caching and pre-fetching algorithms. This allows the data to be stored in a different location from where the applications run. “We have successfully decoupled the traditional requirement of the applications and files being co-located, allowing users to run applications, and store data independently, where it makes the most sense,” asserts Thompson.

LucidLink recognizes security as a huge challenge today and addresses this by empowering users with their own cloud and credentials in the region of their choice, combined with end-to-end encryption using customer-supplied keys, ensuring full customer control over where data is stored and accessed. “Many services offer encryption at rest, but to truly protect your data, it needs to be encrypted at the point of origin, while in flight, and where it is stored,” states George Dochev, co-founder and CTO, LucidLink. “Security was a core design tenet from the beginning, where we wanted to provide users complete control over their data.”

LucidLink allows any application to mount S3 storage as a local file system

LucidLink has helped several customers across multiple industry verticals by eliminating complexity geared at moving data around for different application processes. The result for one customer is the ability to ingest large video files directly into S3 from devices on the edge, run analytics against them from EC2 instances, and view the output via on premise workstations, all utilizing the same authoritative copy.

Moving ahead, LucidLink aims to develop advanced object storage services, such as tiering, journaling, and multi region mirrors, further improving efficiency, security and performance. Their ultimate goal is to become the de facto standard file system for object storage, enabling companies to use cloud object storage for most production workloads.