ParaScale Cloud Storage Software Can Be Downloaded

ParaScale, Inc., a start-up company developing cloud storage solutions, announced at Sys-Con’s Cloud Computing Conference & Expo the immediate global availability of ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software. As a software-only solution that can be downloaded from the web and applied to any standard Linux platform, PCS enables hundreds of commodity servers to be clustered together to act as a file repository with massive capacity and parallel throughput. PCS is being used by leading enterprise and service provider organizations including Blue Coat Systems, Carpathia Hosting, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Stanford Genome Technology Center. Additionally, technology providers including Vembu Technologies and South River Technologies have embraced ParaScale’s Cloud Storage software to extend the value of their offerings.

Steve Kowalski, senior systems architect at Sony Pictures Imageworks said: “We have been able to leverage commodity economics in all parts of our infrastructure, but storage has been the holdout. After realizing benefits across workstations, render farms, and operating systems, we have the opportunity to see the benefits of commodity hardware in storage.”

“Even in a slowing economy, data growth continues and IT managers struggle with cost and capacity challenges every day. Today, we are seeing an explosion in digital documents and rich media in all types of businesses. This presents significant challenges to storage teams who need to account for rapid scaling of capacity and performance in an environment that scrutinizes every capital expense,” said Terri McClure, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group. “ParaScale Cloud Storage harnesses the power and cost-advantages of a standard Linux server with clustering software into an infrastructure solution that addresses the need to cost-efficiently store and manage huge amounts of unstructured data.”

Customer Applications
of the ParaScale Cloud Storage Software
By combining ParaScale software and buyer selected standard servers, managed service providers can build different types of public clouds and offer a variety of storage cloud services, while enterprises can start small and build their own private, corporate clouds inside their own firewall.

In one example, Sony Pictures Imageworks is testing PCS to see how a private storage cloud might better the economics of its storage intensive infrastructure. “We have been working with ParaScale since early in the beta process and we are impressed with the technology and flexibility of the software. Having evaluated many storage technologies over the years, we are optimistic about finding a potential solution that scales in capacity and performance and targets our content heavy workloads, all the while leveraging standard Linux hardware,” said Nick Bali, senior systems engineer.

Carpathia Hosting, a provider of managed IT Services, is using ParaScale software to deliver its InstantOn managed storage services to its enterprise and federal customers. “We have been working closely with ParaScale to allow us to blend the benefits of traditional hosted solutions with cloud technology” said Jon Greaves, chief technology officer of Carpathia Hosting. “We see tremendous demand from our customers for ‘cloud bursting’. We chose to integrate ParaScale Cloud Storage into the Carpathia Services Platform (CSP) to provide customers with a seamless ability to burst into our InstantOn(SM) storage and compute cloud.”

Stanford Genome Technology Center trialed PCS to more affordably and efficiently manage huge volumes of genomic data. "The latest generation of gene sequencers starting to be delivered now generate two to three orders more data per run,” said Dr Baback Gharizadeh, research associate at the Stanford Genome Technology Center. “We are always looking for affordable, practical ways to store these volumes of valuable data. Our evaluations of ParaScale’s cloud storage solution lead us to believe that it has the scale and economy to handle our genomic data, and it is easy enough for our research scientists to manage. "

“ParaScale connected me with a Global 100 firm evaluating its software for a high-scale public and private cloud storage deployment. This sophisticated firm has already determined that ParaScale allows them to use a cookie-cutter hardware approach that provides significant operational benefits and meets their financial benchmarks in supporting their major build-out,” said Noemi Greyzdorf, storage analyst, IDC. “ParaScale’s flexible, object-oriented file system allowing scale and ease of management across different pools of storage and will enable content and general tier2 storage deployments to achieve new levels of economy and flexibility.”

“I’m proud of the ParaScale team today as they deliver the industry’s first shrink-wrapped, cloud storage solution. Additionally, the team has also delivered another first with very broad applicability – the industry’s first object-based cluster file system capable of scale-out on standard Linux hardware,” said Sajai Krishnan, CEO, ParaScale. “Beyond all the marketing around cloud computing and storage, ParaScale’s very pragmatic approach to data storage is transformational and will help IT managers address ballooning file storage costs as well as capacity growth. At ParaScale, our early customers are excited about storage cloud implementations and dreaming up use cases we haven’t considered, striving for new levels of economy, operational management, capacity and performance scale-out. Cloud computing is driving the next generational shift in IT and as we move forward cloud storage will be a major way that storage is consumed.”

ParaScale Cloud Storage Ecosystem
By working closely with partners, ParaScale looks to change the economics of storage-intensive solutions in many industries, and thus deliver strong ROI to customers. Vembu Technologies and South River Technologies have embraced ParaScale’s cloud software and are working with ParaScale to implement end-to-end cloud management solutions.

According to Jayavasanthan John, director of technology, Vembu Technologies, “With the unprecedented and rapidly increasing growth in data across all types of businesses in the last decade, it is inevitable that storage infrastructure evolves to keep pace. ParaScale’s unique cloud-based storage technology is one such leading innovation which lets businesses grow their storage incrementally ‘on demand,’ thus eliminating the need to make huge upfront capital investments. At Vembu, over the last few months we have been integrating and testing our StoreGrid online backup engine with ParaScale cloud storage software. This integrated offering is a big boon to Vembu’s service provider partners who are looking at incrementally scaling their online backup services business."

ParaScale software will soon be available through a broad range of value-added resellers. Resellers recognize that commodity-scaled, easy to manage and grow file storage has a thousand use-cases in any IT environment whether the customer is thinking clouds or not.

“In today’s economy, customers are looking for affordable storage options,” said Jeanne Wilson, CEO, Condor Storage. “ParaScale’s solution provides unbeatable value for tier2 and content storage, even allowing customers to extend their cloud by repurposing servers that they already own. This technology is easy to deploy. It took my sales engineer only an afternoon to figure it out. At Condor we have always delivered market-leading value to our customers and by partnering with ParaScale, we are bringing the first private storage clouds to our enterprise and government customers”.

Availability and Pricing
ParaScale Cloud Storage software version 1.2 is available for immediate purchase and can be downloaded on the company’s Web site. Pricing is based on the physical capacity within the cloud with deployments starting in North America at a list price of $1.05/GB.