Object Storage Firm Caringo Offers Complete Cloud Solution

Sometimes interesting new product announcements fall through the cracks, and that is the fate that befell object storage software vendor Caringo in June when company CEO Mark Goros declared that traditional, file-based storage was not designed for the huge capacities and ubiquitous requirements endemic to so many current companies and organizations.

Goros went so far as to declare that when powered by Caringo's CAStor storage platform, the three new products his company was introducing -- Elastic Content Protection, CloudScaler and Index -- make Caringo "the only object storage vendor to deliver a complete cloud storage software solution."

Looking at it from a different perspective, Goros claims his company is the only one to provide a stack of integrated software appliances that offer cloud storage that is flexible enough to deploy for private or public clouds while seamlessly scaling from terabytes to petabytes.

The result: high performance, simple management and comprehensive interoperability between all components that reportedly slashes the complexity associated with open source or catch-as-you-can solutions.

As add-ons to CAStor -- software that enables massive scalability and future-proof accessibility of unstructured data -- Caringo's new Indexer and Elastic Content Protection deliver "robust insight into data stored and the storage industry's most comprehensive data protection functionality that expands or contracts to meet any storage SLA, footprint or accessibility requirement regardless of capacity or file count."

Elastic Content Protection protects terabyte-to-exabyte scale storage by creating copies (replication) or by dividing original data and parity segments in a way that enables data to be recovered with a subset of total segments using less capacity and operational resources than an additional copy (erasure coding). It also enables the definition of specific levels of protection for different business requirements, and results in a reported 40-70 percent more efficient space utilization depending on protection scheme and use case.

CloudScaler is an add-on to the Object Storage Platform that allows organizations to provide public or private cloud storage as a service. Features include a software gateway appliance that extends the Object Storage Platform with secure multi-tenant features, including authentication of access on a per-call basis, quotas, bandwidth and capacity metering with the ability to integrate third-party billing systems. CloudScaler can also be configured as public, private or hybrid cloud storage.

Indexer provides robust insight and intelligence into data stored in the Object Storage Platform. It includes a NoSQL data store that indexes all objects in a CAStor cluster, and enables searching by filename, universal unique identifier or metadata. It also integrates with CloudScaler portal to present the information in a graphical user interface, and enhances insight with the ability to look at varying views of stored data.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 08/07/2012 at 12:48 PM