Grid storage computing startup Parascale Inc. Monday announced the availability of its new ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software, which it said can be used to cobble together hundreds of commodity servers to act as a massively scalable, high-availability, file repository.
The PCS software can be downloaded from the web to turn a network of Linux-based servers into a cloud storage system.
ParaScale said that the PCS software can be used by managed service providers to build different types of public clouds, which would allow them to offer a variety of cloud storage services. Corporate sites, meanwhile, can use PCS to gradually build their own private clouds using servers inside their own firewall.
Sony Pictures Imageworks is beta testing the PCS technology to determine whether an in-house storage cloud could lower the costs of its storage intensive infrastructure. The animation firm currently uses network-attached storage systems from NetApp and clustered file system storage offerings from Isilon Systems Inc., said Nick Bali, a senior systems engineer at the Sony Pictures Entertainment unit. The NetApp and Isilon systems store 750TB of Sony data, he added.
Bali said he’s still waiting for the full ParaScale system he plans to test — the company currently has two of the four storage nodes slated for installation.
“I’m still running tests, but it looks promising,” he said. “But we just need to make sure it’s capable of being hit with [I/O traffic from] a fairly decent size compute farm and still work well.”
Sony’s compute farm, used to render computer-generated animation, contains about 3,000 nodes. Bali said the company recently cut costs by replacing proprietary hardware with commodity servers, and now plans to do the same with the storage infrastructure. “We’re constantly looking for ways to drive down storage costs,” he said.
In an interview with Computerworld, ParaScale CEO Sajai Krishnan said that once the software is downloaded to multiple Linux servers, a control node enables communication over Gigabit Ethernet on the front end and balances capacity across all nodes on the backend.
“They present a single name space and a single IP address that looks like NAS box,” he said. “Once another box joins the cloud, it automatically takes on the workload and capacity available.”
Krishnan said the grid computing platform relieves storage administrators of two traditionally huge tasks — installing new machines and de-provisioning boxes.
Krishnan said the ParaScale cloud keeps additional copies of your data, so when an administrator needs to de-provision a node, he can simply go in and ask if additional copies of the data exist. If not, he can select the data on the node being decommissioned to be automatically replicated in the background in preparation of node going off line.
“The migration gets done over time, so when it’s done, you can provision a node right then,” Krishnan said. “If it’s not yet done, you can simply wait another couple of days without babying it and it will complete [the task] on its own.”
Terri McClure, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group in Milford, Mass., said in a statement that ParaScale Cloud Storage addresses the need to cost-efficiently store and manage huge amounts of unstructured data in an age when everything is being retained by companies.
ParaScale Cloud Storage software version 1.2 is available for immediate purchase. Pricing is based on the physical capacity within the cloud with deployments starting at a list price of $1.05 per gigabyte.
