Caringo

A startup with roots in one of today's best-selling content addressable storage (CAS) systems has emerged with a proposition for cheaper, more flexible CAS.

Caringo has come out of a well-publicized stealth stint to announce CAStor, a USB memory stick equipped with CAS software for use in x86-based PCs.

Caringo's founder is Paul Carpentier, the Belgium-based technologist whose patents were sold to EMC with a company called FilePool in April 2001. Subsequently, EMC used the FilePool technology in Centera. Carpentier is joined at Caringo by Jonathan Ring, president, and Mark Goros, CEO, who both have experience in technology investing.

CAStor's claim to fame, the execs say, is that it offers a way to set up CAS on secure clustered SATA-based hardware, without requiring a specific vendor's platform, as does EMC's Centera and most other CAS wares on offer today. (See CAS Conundrum and CAS at a Crossroads.) Caringo's founders anticipate that ISVs and integrators will be able to set up and sell telecom, medical imaging, and surveillance applications, among others, at considerable discounts compared with other CAS products.

The downside? There will be some integration needed. The question is whether the effort will compare favorably with products from EMC, Archivas, Bycast, Nexsan, Permabit, Sun, and Symantec/Veritas, which have emerged in the last couple of years -- and for which integration is largely built in by the vendor.Carpentier acknowledged CAStor will require integration, but he says he's created a method that should minimize the effort involved. Instead of creating a set of APIs (application programming interfaces), Caringo engineers have designed a subset of the HTTP protocol to serve as a way for adding specific browser-based functionality to a system.

"You have to have integration at some point, always. We've made that as painless as possible," Carpentier maintains.

He asserts that other aspects of CAStor will distinguish it in the CAS market. One is the product's clustering capability. CAStor can be clustered from two to thousands of nodes, he maintains, allowing for faster data recovery compared with failover RAID systems. While Caringo has tested CASstor in a cluster of up to 82 nodes with 160 Tbytes of storage, the vendor will guarantee performance up to 500 nodes, Carpentier says.

CAStor's pricing is being pushed strenuously as an advantage as well. According to CEO Goros, CASstor will be priced at about $500 per disk drive. Hence, a customer could get a two-node CAS system for rackmount PCs containing two 500-Gbyte SATA drives at about $1,000, or $1 per Gbyte. That's considerably less than an entry-level Centera setup, with sells for roughly $80,000 for a four-node configuration.

This cost model precludes making CAStor compatible with NAS or SAN. "We have no plans to do NAS or SAN," Carpentier says. "That would totally miss the point of our bang for the buck."Another selling point is security. Carpentier has a patent pending on what he terms a "transparent upgradeable hash" technique that dissociates the identifier of a CAS-resident record from its protective hash algorithm. The hash protection can be automatically changed without changing the data, he says. "We keep content safe and upgrade the hash, and we can provide proof that content has never been exposed to corruption," he asserts. This feature could be handy for customers who need to save data securely for long periods of time, while answering to regulatory bodies that its integrity is sound.

It all sounds great, but there's no proof of concept. No customers are yet available to testify to the product, though Caringo's founders say they have "a handful" of beta sites and will go into full production of CAStor by the end of June.

What's more, the hash security feature, which will be called a compliance solution by Caringo, won't ship until a couple of months after the base product becomes available.

Until then, Caringo's execs and tiny staff of 14 full-time and six part-time employees will have to wait for the positive reception they expect. That appears to be no problem. The company appears to have enough money, which Goros says comes from an undisclosed amount of "self-funding." And the firm has a handy virtual setup going, with Carpentier in Belgium and Goros in California, and the engineers in Austin, Texas.

Not a bad way to wait for things to pick up, which Carpentier is confident they will. "The CAS market is huge. EMC has done us the favor of setting up the market, but it's the tip of the iceberg."Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch

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