News

posted on 30 April 2008 14:05

Easy migration from Centera or any primary storage onto cheap, commodity single tier storage is promised by Moonwalk, an Australian data protection software supplier.

It has partnered with Caringo which provides a clustered, x86 node-based and highly scalable storage array offering primary storage performance with content-addressed storage (CAS) capacity and data integrity.

Caringo announced itself two years ago, but was founded in 2005, with one its founders, Paul Carpentier, being a co-inventor of the CAS technology used in Centera. It says CAStor is a massively scalable parallel cluster architecture accommodating huge data growth as needed across heterogeneous hardware. It offers CAS capacity but primary storage speed with guaranteed data integrity in a single flat file space.

CAStor has an object-based storage design with files stored contigously, and automatically replicated to protect against disk failure. The cost is about $1,500/TB ($1.5/GB).

The software is sold on a bootable USB flash drive that plugs into the user's choice of X86 hardware, a ProLiant server for example, with a Gigabyte or more of RAM, one or more hard drives and Gigabit Ethernet. Caringo says it offers built in disaster recovery, backup and continuous data availability features in a single, integrated software package.

Moonwalk's role in the partnership is to make data migration onto CAStor a cakewalk. Its software  intelligently migrates data from costly primary storage volumes, file shares and other CAS archives, think Centera here, to the CAStor boxes.

It's all about cost-savings. Peter Harvey, Moonwalk's CEO, said: “Caringo and Moonwalk have both embraced a vendor-agnostic approach, freeing customers from the dependency and extra costs of proprietary approaches to storage.  A Moonwalk-to-CAStor migration is one of the smartest and most cost-effective actions a company can take to throttle out of control storage costs.”

(Just imagine your hands on the necks of those expensive storage suppliers.)

Mark Goros, Caringo CEO, identified the problem needing Moonwalk's software:  “Migrating a complete CAS-based secondary storage repository to a new hardware platform is no small challenge, but Moonwalk has taken the pain out of the process, making it a quick and easy operation for enterprise storage users to break free of proprietary hardware platforms and enjoy the low cost, performance, assured data integrity and infinite scalability of CAStor.”

Centera is the obvious target here. The other inventor of CAS was Jan Van Riel. He became Director of Technology for EMC's Centera business but joined Caringo in March saying Centera's future was in doubt.

Get a Caringo performance white paper here. The company is funded by Austin Ventures and Vodafone Ventures. European customers include the Swedish National Collections of Music, a central government body for preserving music using CAStor as general archive storage.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}