Pro Softnet Enters Into Cloud Storage

Pro Softnet Corporation, in the Storage-as-a-Service, Online Backup and Storage market, is making an entry in Cloud Storage.

Cloud Storage is a fast growing concept dominated by the likes of Amazon’s S3. Many large corporations including IBM and HP are exploring various options in this segment.

"With IDrive OSS, we are bringing a unique open concept to cloud storage with a high degree of reliability and security. While S3 and others use proprietary APIs for data access, IDrive OSS allows open APIs using native WebDAV for multiple platforms and systems. This makes IDrive OSS instantly more accessible than any other existing cloud options available. Since WebDAV is just an extension of http, all standard security elements related to web including SSL and user authentication are inbuilt into this system," said Raghu Kulkarni, President and CEO of Pro Softnet Corp.

The IDrive OSS follows the similar ‘pay only for what you use’ concept as S3 with aggressive price points. This service is targeted both for individual users as well as businesses. The service is currently in Beta and free.

"While we are not breaking any new grounds here, we do have the experience in managing multiple petabytes of user data. Since our overall strategy for cloud storage is to offer open protocols based access, the road map involves well known protocols such as NFS and CIFS based access to the cloud storage. This should be very compelling for organizations who want to simply extend their storage infrastructure that already use these protocols internally with on-demand functionality," said Vilabh M., Project Lead for the IDrive OSS.

While WebDAV is designed for the web, NFS and CIFS are not. To make IDrive OSS work for these protocols, it might require significant tuning of the protocol at least on the server side to make it perform better for the WAN. There is also the issue of security. Pro Softnet plans to address these issues over the next few quarters.