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Cloud Storage Takes Shape

Cloud storage, although still in its relative infancy, is taking shape, with a slew of announcements this week from Parascale, CD Networks, and Nirvanix.

The idea of letting users store and access data via the Internet, such as Amazons S3 offering, is gaining momentum, forcing vendors to thrash out their respective strategies.

As analyst Fred Moore of Horison Information Strategies explains in a recent research note for the Wikibon user group: “Nearly all storage vendors will have some role to play within cloud storage – cloud computing will drive existing storage and data management concepts to the next level and on a much greater scale than ever before.”

Startup Parascale, in particular, claims to be running with this concept. Although the vendor has not yet launched its Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS) software, the vendor’s CEO, Sajai Krishnan, has his eye on massively scalable systems.

“The clustering model that we have is somewhat analogous to what Google has,” he tells Byte and Switch, drawing a parallel with the famous Google File System (GFS), which consists of thousands of inexpensive commodity storage devices clustered to share large, multi-Gbyte files.

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