Eradicating Bit Rot

MinIO comes with a built-in data integrity checking mechanism. While the cluster is in use, the software checks the integrity of all stored objects transparently and in the background for both users and administrators. If the software detects that an object stored somewhere – for whatever reason – is no longer in its original state, it starts to resynchronize from another source in the cluster where the object is undamaged.

Cross-Site Replication

The software also uses its capabilities to replicate data to another location. Whereas object stores like Ceph do not support complete mirroring for various reasons, MinIO officially supports this use case with the corresponding functions built-in; external additional components are not required.

With the MinIO client, which I discuss later in detail, admins instead simply define the source and target and issue the instructions for replication. The replication target does not even have to be another mini-instance. Basically, any storage device that can be connected to MinIO can be considered – including official Amazon S3 or devices that speak the S3 protocol, such as some network-attached storage (NAS) appliances.

Encryption Included

The role of encryption is becoming increasingly important against the background of data protection and the increasing desire for data sovereignty. In the past, the ability to enable transport encryption was considered sufficient, but today, the demand for encryption of stored data (encryption at rest) is becoming stronger. MinIO has heard admins calling for this function and provides a module for dynamic encryption as part of the object layer. On state-of-the-art CPUs, it uses hardware encryption modules to avoid potential performance problems caused by computationally intensive encryption.