Permabit Cloud Storage Solution

Permabit Technology Corporation announced the release of value tier storage for cloud service providers. Permabit’s storage products allow cloud service providers to deliver the most cost-effective, efficient and reliable storage offerings to their clients with a simple deployment model. Built on patented and proven industry-leading technology, Permabit Cloud Storage is a massively scalable, always available, secure storage platform designed to address the specific needs of service providers and fit seamlessly into their application hosting infrastructure.

Permabit Cloud Storage delivers the high availability necessary for service providers to meet aggressive Service Level Agreements, while its grid architecture enables service providers to seamlessly expand and upgrade storage as needed from terabytes to petabytes. With Permabit’s flexible pricing model, service providers can take advantage of this advanced technology with minimal up-front capital expense, and address the three critical technology concerns customers raise about cloud storage solutions: scalability, availability and security.

Features of the Permabit Cloud Solution include:

• Massive Scalability: Base configurations up to 144TB raw disk capacity provide simple initial deployment options. The system automatically and transparently adapts as storage nodes are added, re-distributing data across the storage grid as the system expands. Up to 32 grids (4.6PB total raw capacity) can be easily managed from a central web-based console. Built- in inline next-generation data deduplication (Dedupe 2.0) and compression dramatically improve the system’s effective storage capacity, providing further cost benefits for both providers and clients.
• Continuous Availability: The Permabit grid architecture allows for seamless storage growth without ever having to take the system offline or interrupt user access. New storage technologies can be added without requiring forklift upgrades, providing continuous availability for service provider clients. Built-in data protection via patented RAIN-EC technology provides the industry’s most reliable protection of client data.  New Intelligent Recovery extends the safety of the Permabit system achieving up to 1000 times more reliability than industry-standard RAID 6. A fully redundant architecture coupled with built-in replication for automated off-site disaster recovery ensures client data is always safe, protected and available.
• Security: Multi-tenancy capabilities provide the ability to host thousands of customers’ data securely within a single solution, delivering the most efficient and cost-effective method for hosting storage. For even higher levels of security, built-in AES encryption can be enabled. As an added benefit, solution providers can leverage built-in WORM capabilities to offer compliance-oriented storage to their clients as an additional fee opportunity.
• High Performance: New Model 4012 Access Nodes achieve 280% faster performance by utilizing two high-performance Intel Xeon® Quad Core processors. Additional access nodes can be added to existing storage grids to boost performance as needed to meet customer demand. Access Nodes provide standard NFS and CIFS file sharing services to easily fit into existing service infrastructures.

Along with the Permabit Cloud Storage solution, the company is introducing several new features to all of its storage products. These features, which significantly enhance data management and safety for cloud storage providers, include:

• Advanced performance monitoring: Monitoring provides cloud storage and enterprise administrators with both detailed and aggregate performance utilization and trending.
• Scriptable tools: New command line tools are expressly designed to streamline the automated creation, modification and deletion of file systems and provide utilization reporting for chargeback.
• Phone home reporting: Advanced phone home logging automatically uploads operational logs for proactive analysis while removing sensitive data ensuring the highest levels of security. This enables system optimization while providing predictive failure analysis services to reduce service calls.
• RAIN-EC Intelligent Recovery: Should the system ever experience simultaneous failures on separate nodes, unprotected data is automatically recovered before restoring full data redundancy, resulting in up to a four times increase in long-term data safety.
• Improved performance: A combination of software enhancements and use of quad-core Intel processors have increased performance 280% over previous releases, while reducing power consumption by 70%.

"Cloud service providers need to focus on offering the best possible service and solutions to their customers. The storage infrastructure is a key determinant in a provider’s success, but that does not mean they need to develop a storage system themselves. By using solutions such as Permabit’s Cloud Storage for Service Providers, they can stay focused on their business and not be distracted by the development and support of a storage infrastructure," said George Crump, Storage Switzerland.

"Historically, it has been very challenging for service providers to be experts in both hosted services and data storage. Permabit has developed storage solutions since our inception that were designed to meet the needs of service providers. With the Permabit Cloud Storage Solution for Service Providers, we become the supplier that enables service providers to offer the best and most reliable storage with the efficiency of de-dupe and without a heavy, up-front financial investment," said Tom Cook, President and CEO, Permabit.