Today Basho, the sponsor company of the open source NoSQL database Riak, announced Riak CS, a new software platform for building multitenant cloud storage systems. Riak CS can be used to build public clouds, on-premise private clouds or to build the foundation for Web applications.

Riak CS is a proprietary system built on the open source Riak structure. “Riak CS includes software that will not be available via open source, particularly to handle multi-tenancy and large object support for data that is stored in a Riak database,” Basho CMO Bobby Patrick told me. “In many ways, our distributed database technology can be thought of as single-tenant storage for an app and our cloud storage technology as multi-tenant storage for a platform.”

Here are the main features of Riak CS:

• An API compatible with Amazon S3, so it could also likely be used to build a hybrid environment based on Amazon’s storage cloud. Objects stored in Riak CS can be up to 5GB.
• Reporting tools that enable administrators to bill for resource usage, be that internally by charging different departments depending on use, or by creating customer facing services with a pay for what you use scheme.
• Each object (file) stored can be up to 5GBs.

The notion of building cloud technologies that can run both in public or on-prem is spreading. It started with OpenStack for infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) and and was followed by Cloud Foundry for platform-as-a-service and and EMC Atmos Cloud Deliver Platform for cloud storage. The ability to be used for all types of cloud is fast becoming a “must have” feature for cloud software. This is important because it ensures that new private cloud architectures can be migrated to public clouds in the future, and it provides the possibility of migrating between public cloud providers.

Amazon Web Services remains a major leader in cloud services, but has been slow to embrace any sort of on-premise strategy including hybrid cloud. Last week’s partnership with Eucalyptus marked its first major foray into the hybrid world, and was seen as a major blow to OpenStack. Many potential customers may wait and see whether AWS partners with any storage-centric cloud providers before making the leap to Riak CS.

Disclosure: EMC sponsors our sister site ServicesAngle.