What’s Caringo’s approach to a scalable and resilient cloud storage platform? Deliver a “complete cloud storage software stack,” says Adrian Herrera, the storage software firm’s senior director of marketing.
Today, the company unveiled three new products, Elastic Content Protection, CloudScaler and Indexer. When deployed in conjunction with CAStor — the company’s object storage platform that is used in storage systems from Dell, among others — the company says the new software can provide public and private clouds with capabilities and efficiencies that are proving elusive for IT organizations.
CAStor provides an object storage foundation, which is more efficient forcing file-based storage models onto cloud infrastructures, according to Herrera. Simply put, he says, “When you store information as an object, it makes everything more responsive.”
Caringo takes this philosophy and expands on it with new software meant to provide data protection; extend multi-tenancy, metering and user management features; and perhaps most critically for business environments, quickly find and retrieve data.
Elastic Content Protection allows IT managers to select which level of protection to apply to their data. For example, storage administrators can choose replication for smaller files and active data. For large-scale storage, administrators can opt for erasure coding. The software’s multi-threaded striping capabilities can lead to a 40 percent to 70 percent improvement in space utilization, according to the company’s estimates.
And Caringo’s platform is “inherently HA,” explained Herrera. “If one node goes down, the objects are on another node,” he said, adding that in the event of a hiccup, the software “automatically replicates the missing pieces to another node.”
CloudScaler provides multi-tenant features, allowing public cloud services and on-premise installations to securely segment storage. It features a web-based portal and LDAP and AD support for user authentication along with a host of metering controls, including bandwidth, capacity and quota management options.
Indexer is a NoSQL-based index that tracks all of the objects in a CAStor cluster. It provides data discoverability via searches by filename, universal unique identifier or metadata. Indexer also offers CloudScaler portal integration for graphical views of the information generated by the software.
All told, this one-stop approach to storage should provide organizations with a quick path toward cloud storage deployments, while maintaining scalability and keeping their data safe, according to Caringo’s CEO Mark Goros.
“Our complete cloud storage software solution enables any enterprise to optimize storage deployments securely in their data center with access from any platform,” he comments in a company statement. “System administrators can now stand up a petabyte cluster in 30 minutes delivering elasticity to backend infrastructure in addition to front-end usage.”