Caringo CAStor 4.0 With Darkive Adaptive Power Conservation

Caringo, Inc. announced CAStor 4.0, an upgrade to its object storage platform that extends the business value of CAStor, providing new features, improving on operational and reporting efficiency and adding an innovative adaptive power conservation technology, Darkive.

CAStor object-based software seamlessly scales from terabytes to petabytes using off the- shelf, commodity server hardware. It lowers cost of ownership from acquisition through operations. Customers can mix and match hardware specs, vendors and generations in the same cluster. Even older hardware can be run cost effectively with Darkive. CAStor dynamically balances load and storage based on usage and node specifications. Data integrity, authentication and retention are built into the architecture for compliance or common sense information protection.

“The CAStor 4.0 release is well timed as enterprise object storage clouds are just starting to go mainstream,” said Terri McClure, Senior Analyst at ESG. “With reducing operational costs as a top IT priority, the combination of the new Darkive intelligent power management, with the economics of massive scalability and off-the-shelf hardware, provide CAStor 4.0 with a powerful value proposition that should help to accelerate payback on IT investments.”

“CAStor 4.0 offers an organization the speedy access of primary storage with the long term preservation of an online archive in a single value based tier,” said Mark Goros, Chief Executive Officer at Caringo. “The new capabilities of CAStor 4.0 offer even more power to create a storage environment that fiercely protects data integrity, provides continuous content availability and does it all cost effectively for our customers on the hardware of their choice.”

CAStor 4.0 introduces Darkive adaptive power conservation technology, a patent pending innovation that enables companies to set a few parameters and lets Darkive adaptively spin down disks and reduce CPU utilization. Administrators have complete control over Darkive and can specify periods of inactivity before disks and processors are spun down so that CPU utilization is reduced to meet specific power reduction targets. Individual CAStor nodes can be designated as an archival tier with disks and processors only spinning up when data needs to be recalled from the archive.

Content Router 2.0 provides object replication to geographically diverse locations based on its metadata. Content Router is a policy based workflow engine that allows organizations to construct simple yet sophisticated content distribution networks for disaster recovery, data distribution and continuous content availability. With this new release, Caringo has eliminated the Content Router database to increase throughput and scaling. The content router now makes it easy to snap in indexing and search engine metadata queries, virus scan applications and more. Remote Synchronous Writes, an exciting new real time option, now complements Content Router to allow instant safeguarding of content in more than one cluster.

With CAStor 4.0 it is now possible to append content to a pre-existing object to create trustable audit trails and manifests. A new Copy method allows the update of metadata to simply change a data field. Using the immutability override, a trusted admin can modify retention periods for e-discovery purposes. Caringo has also enhanced the end-to-end data integrity chain of CAStor with HTTP standard content-MD5 validation that eliminates potential data corruption problems across the wire before the data is written to CAStor. These enhancements give administrators more control over CAStor content without impacting the integrity of the data.

CAStor now makes extensive use of Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) and SMART disk drives to improve operations and reporting efficiency. CAStor leverages IPMI to monitor the health of the CPU, disk drives and other components with the cluster and alerts administrators if a potential problem emerges. Tasks such as flashing the drive light on a faulty disk drive or putting the system into volume recovery suspension to swap drives or repair a network fault are now easier than ever. Caringo developed the immutability override, proactive power caps and enhanced cluster management via IPMI features in conjunction with Dell, its preferred OEM partner for these capabilities.

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