Moonwalk Chases CAS With Caringo

Moonwalk ramped up its data migration efforts today by teaming up with content addressable storage (CAS) specialist Caringo.

Australian startup Moonwalk touts its eponymous software as a way for users to move files around a LAN without the use of middleware. It is now tying this technology to Caringos CAStor clustered storage software.

“We’re familiar with each other’s technologies,” says Peter Harvey, the Moonwalk CEO, alluding to the existing certification deal between the two firms. “What we’re announcing is the combination of these two technologies together as a solution.”

Caringo is pushing the CAStor software as a way to turn commodity x86 servers into a low-cost storage cluster, although shifting data between different parts of this infrastructure has not always been easy.

By partnering with Moonwalk, the vendors now claim the ability to quickly migrate an entire CAS-based storage repository to a new hardware platform. “The Moonwalk software links with Caringo across the network,” says Harvey, adding that CAStor can shave up to 90 percent off users’ primary storage costs.The two vendors will also be reference-selling their offerings, according to Harvey, although they will face stiff competition from established CAS vendors such as EMC with its Centera hardware.

“Centera has got 200-plus partners, some of which do file system archiving, which is similar to this [data migration partnership],” says Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Brian Babineau, warning that Moonwalk and Caringo have their work cut out. “It’s a good partnership, but these are two pretty small companies.”

Moonwalk and Caringo are nonetheless taking something of a new approach to CAS/data migration, according to the analyst. “This is unique in the fact that it is a software-plus-software offering, whereas most of the other solutions on the market are software plus hardware,” he explains. “These guys are saying that they can be hardware independent, which gives customers more flexibility, and that’s a big benefit.”

Moonwalk would only reveal the identity of one user, Stanford University, which is testing the joint data migration/CAS offering, although Harvey says that the vendor is in discussions “with some really big companies.”

The CEO also gave Byte and Switch an update on Moonwalk’s company roadmap, explaining that it has already clinched some OEM deals for its software. “We have got two [OEMs] that are just kicking off and another fairly large one in discussion,” he says, explaining that one OEM is an email archiving company and the other is a storage vendor.The exec also described the next file system format that will be added to Moonwalk’s data migration software. “It depends on network demands, but it will probably be a file system under Solaris."

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