Open Private Cloud Storage Platform From ParaScale

ParaScale, Inc. introduced ParaScale Cloud Storage software (PCS) R2.0. The new release targets enterprise storage administrators who must economically scale capacity and performance, and service providers who want to offer a variety of storage cloud services.

ParaScale’s open solution leverages any commodity hardware running Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS or CentOS, and can integrate applications directly onto storage nodes. PCS R2.0 also provides integration capabilities into virtualized environments and web services.

This latest release of ParaScale Cloud Storage software reflects the growing realization by global customers that existing approaches to managing their stored data assets prevent them from rapidly delivering a pool of storage that easily scales capacity and performance independently and economically. PCS R2.0 removes these obstacles as a software-only solution that can be downloaded from the web and applied to any standard Linux platform to enable hundreds of commodity servers to be clustered together as a file repository, as a storage cloud with massive capacity and parallel throughput, or as a disaster recovery option for virtualized environments.

“The power and scale of cloud compute and storage begins to make sense in an open and interoperable environment where resources can be provisioned as needed, any commodity hardware can be added to grow the cloud including repurposed servers, and new applications can be leveraged to create a virtualized data center,” explained Arun Taneja, principal, Taneja Group. “ParaScale provides a unique open alternative to other cloud storage platforms and is developing an ecosystem of partners to integrate applications like back-up and disaster recovery, content management, and data migration on its storage servers.”

“Storage teams in 2010 are going to face the issue of getting ready for growth with budgets and headcount frozen at 2009 levels. How are they going to pull off this magic? By going outside the box, by looking at technologies that the innovators are using and not old workhorse NAS technologies from 1990,” said Sajai Krishnan, CEO, ParaScale. “Release 2.0 represents a significant step to provide our customers with a simple solution to store and manipulate any type of Tier II file data on higher-performance, more scalable, more accessible, and cheaper storage. Our customer’s finance department is especially going to appreciate that for the first time the storage team can repurpose hardware, and buy disk drives at any computer retail outlet to store some of their enterprise data reliably.”

One of the key features of PCS R2.0 enables ParaScale to function as a back-up for virtual machines and their respective data. In the event of a failure, the virtual machines can be booted directly from ParaScale and be up and running in seconds without having to move around VM images.

“Our goal at Even Enterprises has always been to be a leading edge server, storage and virtualization solution provider so when we started looking for the next growth step in our area of technology the answer was simple: Cloud Storage,” explained Esti Even, owner of Even Enterprises. “We were looking for a virtualized storage solution equal to that of our primary compute virtualization solution, VMware. When we decided which horse to ride the decision took a little more work. Our criteria included finding a solution that fit into our customer base which looks for mid- to high-end storage, had already proven itself as reliable and cost competitive, and took advantage of our strength as a leading white box storage provider. ParaScale turned out to be the clear choice.”

Additional key features
of ParaScale Cloud Storage software R2.0 include:

• Web service API expansion through SOAP and REST to provide configuration, administration, and provisioning support – Enterprises and service providers can provide self service options through the web and integrate ParaScale functionality into third-party dashboards, control panels and workflows.
• Synchronous replication based on policy per multi-tenant instance – Administrators can enable protection strategies that include up to eight synchronous copies to different data sets.
• Private cloud multi-tenancy support including metered usage for chargeback – A ParaScale cloud can be partitioned to provide different service levels as well as deliver usage based metrics and pricing to internal and external customers.
• Proactive reporting and monitoring capabilities – Instead of requiring customers to provide detailed information and perform recovery activities, ParaScale R2.0 provides remote monitoring combined with auto healing capabilities.

VISI, a Minnesota-based regional provider of enterprise managed hosting services, has selected ParaScale software as the cloud storage platform to enable a transition into cloud services. “ParaScale provides us with a complete cloud storage solution which integrates storage software and hardware built on commodity components,” said Jason Baker, CTO, VISI. “We are excited about the new administrative web services included in version 2.0. Our developers will leverage the web services API to improve our cloud storage service automation and integrate with our customer portal. It is an absolutely critical feature for service providers like VISI. ParaScale is one of the few cloud storage vendors with a comprehensive web services interface. Cloud storage offers service providers many revenue generation opportunities; and leveraging ParaScale’s flexible and capable platform, our team is delivering innovative storage solutions to realize the upside.”

BitPusher, LLC is a San Francisco provider of managed information technology infrastructure for web applications and other on-line services. According to Daniel Lieberman, CEO of BitPusher, "ParaScale is the only comprehensive storage solution we’ve found which leverages commodity hardware and will allow us to provide a complete, redundant distributed file storage solution with NFS support for cost sensitive customers. ParaScale provides the flexibility we need for us to make this into a service offering, in addition to reselling solutions."

Availability and Pricing
ParaScale Cloud Storage software R2.0 will be available November 30th. Pricing is based on the physical capacity within the cloud with deployments starting in North America at a list price of 95¢/GB.