– Mark Goros, CEO of Caringo (www.caringo.com), says:
Reducing storage costs is a top agenda item for enterprise data centers, yet data is an organization’s most valuable asset. Struggling with the performance, scalability and management complexity required to maintain conventional file-based storage systems is a losing battle if you need to store your data more than 90 days. Object-based storage delivers better value and reduced cost of ownership as well as improved performance, scalability and near-zero administration. Object storage systems remove the complexity and management costs associated with keeping an enterprise data center in production-ready status. Object storage is based on a single, flat address space that where archive data never gets in the way of active data. CAStor automatically distributes data to the location it is needed and manages integrity and preservation of data according to its value and stage in the data lifecycle.

CAStor is innovative software that creates object-based storage clusters using standard server x86 hardware. This, single pool of storage scales seamlessly and flexibly to meet dynamic capacity demands. CAStor is self-managing and self-healing minimizing operational costs. CAStor software is the perfect infrastructure to create private or hybrid cloud storage delivering multi-tenancy, named objects and the self-management required for a true active high-performance data store along with the long-term preservation and archiving for compliance.

How can data center/IT managers benefit from this?
Object storage delivers better data availability and faster recovery than RAID
In an object storage system, content is replicated so that a minimum of two replicas assures continuous data availability. If a disk goes down, another replica still exists. All other disks in the cluster join in to replace the lost replicas. The recovery takes only minutes with no interruption of data availability and no noticeable performance degradation. Conversely, when a RAID disk fails, the system slows to a crawl while it takes hours or days to rebuild the array, impacting production application performance until the process is complete

No Backups required
With a well-designed object storage system, backups are not required. Multiple replicas ensure that content is always available and an offsite disaster recovery replica can be automatically created if desired. If the primary cluster becomes unavailable, the replica can be used transparently since all content is identical in all clusters where the replicas are stored.

Eliminates Migration by making it routine
In file storage infrastructures, hardware migration or even upgrading is expensive and very time consuming. When approaching or exceeding petabyte level capacities, it simply ceases to be a physical possibility. That’s why CAStor’s architecture simply adopts migration as a daily fact of life. On a continuous basis, new units can be added and will automatically join the cluster, and old units can be retired with a single command. CAStor will load balance and migrate data automatically, in the background where it never affects primary performance.

Provides better disk utilization
Object storage provides better hard disk utilization than block storage because files are laid down contiguously on disk. Object storage knows the size of a file so there is never a need to over provision as with a block based solution. This means that object storage can run 90% or greater in terms of disk utilization whereas block based system, even highly optimized, can only achieve up to 70% at best

Provides Easy Access to Storage Anywhere, Any Time via HTTP
Cloud storage is commonly delivered as Software as a Service (Saas) application via the Internet, so using HTTP as the primary protocol to access object storage pools vastly simplifies the process for cloud storage providers to integrate object storage systems into their service offerings.

We believe that file systems are a relic of the past and the management of these files systems is taking up your valuable time and require too much management time. The massive amounts of digital data being generated today should be stored with its metadata for secure, reusable, long term, multi-application use. Simplicity is what you should be looking for as simplicity brings performance, flexibility and robustness. Storing your content in CAStor allows applications to access it either as an object or as a file. This allows traditional applications or users to access your data in a file format, but gives the limitless headroom required for data growth into the future. CAStor allows you to choose your hardware. You can even mix and match hardware in a CAStor cluster so you never become locked into a single vendor. . Building a robust storage cluster that can grow dynamically as your data grows will dramatically improve the scope and economics of your data center. CAStor will make your content storage affordable, scalable, fast and easy.. Caringo’s object storage software is a way to protect your investment and is future proof, so as server technology evolves your storage system will evolve with it by allowing you to add the newest technology available to you.