News

posted on 11 June 2008 08:59

A startup called Parascale aims to provide software enabling content providers to build their own petabyte-sized cloud storage data farms.

It's aiming its developing offering at Web 2.0-type companies with dense media content needing to connect to milions of customers across the Internet. These companies will be able to build their own data farms in-the-cloud by hooking industry-standard servers running Linux together into a facility able to store and deliver petabytes of data.

Parascale’s Cloud Storage (PCS) software aggregates these servers into a single highly scalable virtual file-storage appliance, accessible via standard file access protocols like NFS, HTTP and FTP. PCS is patented technology which automatically and transparently migrates and replicates files among storage nodes to balance and optimize performance, without any interruption in client access.

The company was founded in 2004 by industry veteran Cameron Bahar - he has an HP and Terradata background - and is headquartered in Silicon Valley. Members of Parascale's founding engineering team have delivered distributed operating systems and distributed file systems for companies including Sun (Sun Cluster), HP (Open SSI), Teradata (Teradata RDBMS), and IBM (AIX TCF). It is financed by a syndicate, led by the Oskuoy Group, that includes seed-round investors in Google and PayPal.

The company has recruited Sajai Krishnan as its CEO. He comes from five years in NetApp where he was most recently the general manager of the company’s StoreVault business unit that focuses on network storage appliances for mid-market businesses. (StoreVault appliances have recently been folded back into NetApp's mainstream offerings.) Krishnan also served as the general manager of NetApp’s Storage Management Software business, overseeing the company’s core management products.

He described the opportunity at Parascale thus: “As technology and demand trends converge, I am really excited about the opportunity Parascale has to dramatically change the economics of digital content storage. For businesses that aim to deliver rich-media, data storage is a major expense item in their P&L. Similarly, data storage is a major part of the cost of solutions in video surveillance, medical imaging, oil and gas, and other content-heavy verticals."

"Parascale software will enable 100% standard Linux servers to be knitted together into petabyte-sized data farms using 100% standard file-serving protocols, providing massive throughput and automatic load-balancing with minimal management. Working with solution and channel partners, Parascale will crack-the-code for cloud storage and enable content-businesses to roll their own clouds and service-providers to build the scalable infrastructure for their hosted content storage businesses.”

Bullish stuff. Parascale is joining Atrato, EMC (Hulk/Maui), HP (ExDS9100), IBM (DIV), Isilon, NetApp (ONTAP GX clusters), Nirvanix (SDN), Panasas, Xiotech and others in that general group of suppliers aiming to deliver products that can cope with storing and accessing billions of files. Sun might also join this crew with open source software as well as its current hardware set-up..

Bahar is Parascale's CTO and said this about the new CEO: “Sajai’s success in evangelizing innovative storage solutions to a global base of customers utilizing novel demand generation methods and leveraging channels, in addition to his vision of how storage for digital content is evolving, makes him the ideal choice to lead a team of individuals who have come together to present a radically new experience in storage management for digital content." 

We might expect product to emerge in 2009.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}