ParaScale cloud storage software hits general availability

Storage start-up ParaScale is heading into general availability with software that aggregates disk storage on standard Linux servers to create pools of storage that can be used by cloud services providers and to build private clouds.

ParaScale had been in beta with 15 or so customers, including Blue Coat Systems, Carpathia Hosting, the Stanford Genome Technology Center and Sony Pictures ImageWorks.

The start-up announced general availability Monday at the Sys-Con Cloud Computing Conference & Expo in New York City. In this first general release, ParaScale's Cloud Storage software (PCS) will work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS, an open source version of Red Hat. Supporting Solaris and Windows is a possibility but not something ParaScale has definitively settled upon.

Whatever operating system is used, the idea is to aggregate disk into large pools of storage that can be easily managed and accessed over a network.

"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," according to Parascale.

Target customers include cloud providers that need to offer storage over the Internet in a highly scalable manner, as well as enterprises attempting to improve the efficiency of storage operations inside the firewall.

Sony is testing PCS to see whether a private cloud – an internal deployment modeled after Web-based storage services such as Amazon S3 – might provide cost-benefit advantages by taking advantage of commodity hardware, according to Parascale.
Stanford Genome Technology Center, meanwhile, did a trial run with PCS to improve the efficiency of managing huge volumes of data related to genomic research.

Beta trials were mixed about 50/50 between services providers and enterprises building private storage clouds, says ParaScale CEO Sajai Krishnan. Both models are gaining traction, he says.

"This will not be an either-or situation," Krishnan says. "Any enterprise of any size will have use of both public and private clouds."

PCS can be downloaded on the ParaScale Web site and will be offered through OEM customers. Pricing starts at $1.05 per gigabyte. The first four terabytes are free, Krishnan says. The most cost-effective way to use ParaScale is to take advantage of the internal storage on Linux servers, but customers can also connect to Fibre Channel, network-attached storage and other types of storage, according to Krishnan.

ParaScale will have to compete against storage giant EMC, which developed its own Atmos software that aggregates large pools of storage to enable cloud-like deployments.