News

posted on 18 March 2008 10:26

Commodity hardware content-addressable storage (CAS) supplier Caringo has recruited EMC's Director of Technology for the Centera Division. He says EMC is scaling down the Centera unit.

Jan Van Riel, together with Paul Carpentier, formed a start-up, FilePool, and invented the CAS concept. Objects to be stored had a hash address computed from their contents and were stored on that basis. This meant that changed objects had a different hash address and did not over-write previous versions as happens in standard file systems.

Van Riel and Carpentier sold FilePool to EMC which used the technology to develop Centera, which it positioned as a reference information data store and which now leads the substantial CAS market. Van Riel became EMC's director of technology for the Centera unit for the next 8 years.

Carpentier co-founded startup Caringo because he believes that CAS technology can be implemented on commodity hardware and its scalability increased through clustering. Altogether CAS can be used for much, much more than fixed content storage. This is the thinking underlying Caringo's CAStor product.

Van Riel has now joined Caringo as its VP for Advanced Technology and will work with Carpentier who is Caringo's chief technology officer. Van Riel said appropos his joining Caringo that EMC was scaling back its Centera unit and that its future was unclear.

There are thoughts that perhaps EMC's forthcoming Hulk/Maui clustered object storage system might overlap Centera and offer a more efficient filestore for terabytes of unstructured file content.