Basho, announced that its Riak CS is now open source, expanding the ease of access to its software for developers, enterprise architects and IT operations professionals who want to build public or private storage clouds.

Riak CS is a multi-tenant, distributed, S3-compatible cloud-storage platform that enables enterprises and service providers to launch public or private cloud services. Built on top of Riak, an open-source distributed database, it provides horizontal scale, high durability and low operational overhead in a distributed object-storage system.

Greg Collins, Basho president and CEO, said it had been almost a year since the company released Riak CS and has seen rapid adoption by cloud operators, telcos and enterprises.

“Our customers have deployed Riak CS as the object storage engine inside popular cloud computing platforms, including Apache CloudStack and OpenStack,” he said. “Today, by open sourcing Riak CS, we are making it easier for users to experiment with and test Riak CS, to provide rapid product feedback, and to contribute to its future capabilities.”

The company also announced the general availability of Riak CS v1.3, the third release of its cloud-storage software. Features added in this release include multi-part upload, which allows users to upload parts of large files in parallel, and better control for multi-tenant environments, among others.

Riak CS Enterprise adds Basho’s multi-data-center replication technology and is backed by the company's around-the-clock support and service-level commitments.

Customers of Riak CS Enterprise include Datapipe, Deutsche Vermögensberatung, IDC Frontier, Rovio, and Yahoo! Japan.