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Archil disks deliver infinite, high-performance storage and provide instant, local-like access to massive data sets, wherever they’re stored. Archil is designed as a high-speed caching layer that sits between your servers and your data sources, like Amazon S3, providing a fully POSIX-compatible interface to your data. With Archil’s custom file protocol, developers can achieve high-speed access to shared data, even if it requires lots of small files.

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Core components

Client instances

Connect to disks using the Archil client

Archil storage system

High-performance, durable caching layer

Data sources

Your S3-compatible storage where data is durably stored
The instances mounting Archil disks (client instances) and the data sources run in your existing cloud accounts. The Archil storage system runs as a service in Archil-managed cloud accounts. If your organization requires that all software be hosted in your own cloud account, contact us to learn more about our BYOC options for organizations with 100 TiB of data or more.

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Archil file protocol

The Archil client implements a new, custom storage protocol that enables full POSIX-compliance and high-performance for small-file workloads, such as git. The Archil client supports all Linux distributions. For more information, see the reference documentation for the Archil client.

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Archil storage system

Archil disks are hosted on a shared cloud service, the Archil storage system. This centralized, durable cache stores frequently accessed data and recently written data. The cache provides near-infinite storage that automatically expands to the working set size of your application. The Archil storage service is designed to provide sub-millisecond latency for data access. Because the Archil cache is shared across all clients, you can achieve low-latency access to reference data from multiple servers simultaneously. The Archil storage system efficiently translates POSIX-like requests into other protocols, such as Amazon S3, even when those operations (such as rename) are not supported by the underlying data source. Archil disks are always strongly read-after-write consistent for all connected clients. Synchronization between the Archil storage system and the underlying data sources is eventually completed, and generally completes in less than 5 minutes.

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Security

Archil encrypts all data at rest (AES-256) and in transit (TLS 1.3), with access control via IAM roles and scoped API keys. Archil is SOC 2 certified and HIPAA/GDPR compliant. For full details, see Security & Compliance.

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Data durability

Archil is designed to provide 99.999% (5 nines) durability for newly written data before it is synchronized to S3, and a 99.99% (4 nines) uptime SLA for disk availability. Archil’s caching layer automatically stores data redundantly within multiple Availability Zones in the disk’s region. A successful fsync() guarantees that the written data has been committed redundantly across these Availability Zones; the 5-nines durability applies from the moment fsync() returns, before the data has synchronized to your data source. There is no single point of failure that can cause data loss. An Archil disk is not a single server or cache node — if an individual node, or even an entire Availability Zone, fails before your data has synchronized to the data source, the disk continues serving your data from the remaining Availability Zones and synchronization completes normally. No data is lost, and no action is required on your part.