Caringo took the wraps off new storage software with built-in support for a major Big Data framework.

The Austin, Texas-based object storage specialist today announced Caringo Swarm, a scalable unified storage solution that enables organizations to manage object, block and file data under a single platform. Plus, it contains “out-of-the-box” support for Hadoop, enabling businesses to float new, potentially business-boosting analytics-based data services.

In a statement, the company explained that its approach to Big Data storage “implements a true read-only Hadoop file system, offering a high-bandwidth pipe straight from the storage cluster that entirely eliminates the separate ingest step from archive or filer into HDFS.” Intermediate results can still be held in HDFS, claims the company. Metadata ad-hoc queries get a performance boost courtesy of an enhanced metadata indexer.

Caringo Swarm also leverages RAM to speed access to objects and lowering processing overhead. The company’s RAM-based dynamically distributed index technology can locate and access object data with a zero IOPS penalty, reduce CPU load by up to 50 percent and relegate “multicasting to a secondary role,” according to Caringo. The company asserts on its website that Swarm “runs everything from RAM, including its distributed dynamic index, leaving up to 98 percent of hard drive capacity for content.”

In addition, a single Swarm cluster can scale to over 100 petabytes. A 300 percent decrease in node boot time ensures virtually non-disruptive upgrades.

Working off a software foundation based on CAStor, Caringo’s object storage technology, Swarm incorporates support for leading types of data center storage, including private clouds “multi-tenant, S3-like storage,” via CloudScaler. FileScaler, as its name suggest, supports SMB and NFS file protocols. Scheduled for third quarter availability, BlockScaler for iSCSI support offers pure block over object functionality.

Swarm can also form the basis of a hardy, hardware-agnostic enterprise storage environment, claims Caringo. “There are no-single points of failure, no specialty nodes and no vulnerable metadata databases.” A play on words, of sorts, Swarm offers the “ability to support complex operations with the simplest ingredients,” said Caringo CEO Mark Goros in a statement.

The company’s new offering “frees data from hardware, location and applications,” added Goros. “Now there is a shared, seamlessly scalable pool of storage that can provide access for all major protocols.”