Caringo Rolls Out Cloud Storage Products

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Object-based storage vendor Caringo on Tuesday announced three products for building private, hybrid, or public cloud infrastructures.

The Elastic Content Protection, CloudScaler, and Indexer products, which are deployed on industry standard hardware, in combination with the CAStor Object Storage Platform, work together to form multi-petabyte storage systems.

Elastic Content Protection (ECP) is data protection software that administrators can use to enforce service-level agreements. It creates copies of data for replication by parsing the original data and parity segments so that data can be recovered with only a subset of the total segments. That parsing and distribution of data results in less capacity and fewer operation resources than techniques that create a separate copy.

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ECP also allows replication for different business requirements and applications. Small files or frequently accessed files may be replicated, while larger files may use the erasure coding form of replication.

Within CAStor and with ECP, individual nodes are protected from failure and all nodes participate in the recovery of data.

The CloudScaler software lets an organization provide public, hybrid, or private cloud storage as a service. It is deployed as an appliance at the customer location and extends the use of CAStor into a multi-tenant cloud. The software includes authentication and authorization via the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol or Microsoft's Active Directory and allows administrators to bill for storage use and bandwidth. Administrators can manage CloudScaler via a Web-based portal. CloudScaler can be installed on a dedicated industry-standard server or as a virtual machine.

Finally, the Indexer provides visibility into data stored in the Caringo Object Storage Platform. Through the use of a NoSQL database, all objects are indexed and can then be searched for by filename, metadata, or a unique identifier.

All these products are layered onto the CAStor platform, which virtualizes hardware and networking resources into a pool of storage that is not limited by capacity of file count. Applications can access the pool of storage via HTTP or WebDAV, and the system supports CIFs, NFS, and Amazon S3 applications. They integrate with the Caringo Content Router, which automates the distribution of data between CAStor clusters. The products also support the Citrix CloudPlatform and Apache Cloud Stack.

Caringo was founded in 2005 by CTO Paul Carpentier, formerly of Filepool (acquired by EMC), President Jonathan Ring, and CEO Mark Goros.

Deni Connor is founding analyst for Storage Strategies NOW, an industry analyst firm that focuses on storage, virtualization, and servers.

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