Content Addressed Storage: New Caringo CAStor 2.0 Delivers Archival Integrity With Speed And Access Of Primary Storage
Caringo, Inc. recently announced a major evolution of its CAStor software that delivers the integrity of content-addressed storage (CAS) with the access and performance specs of primary disk storage, enabling continuous data availability of even deeply archived files.
CAStor 2.0 does away with the need for traditional storage tiers used for information lifecycle management systems where less frequently accessed are moved to lower-cost, lower-availability storage. In contrast, CAStor provides a flat, single-tier, massively scalable architecture that runs and scales on commodity hardware. While substantially lower in cost than traditional ILM, CAStor adds high availability and scalable reliability. Field-proven to keep records online and available on demand, CAStor 2.0 brings to market for the first time a way to deliver the speed of primary storage with the integrity of an active archive.
With this newly and significantly evolved edition, CAStor also adds asymmetric local and wide area replication to enhance its built-in disaster recovery, archiving and continuous data availability capabilities. Highly configurable, CAStor ensures that redundant preserved data resides on separate sub-clusters within the same site, or on a remote site.
Additional new features include:
Management Console
CAStor 2.0 now includes a web-based management console providing a mechanism for performing core administration tasks and monitoring the health of the entire cluster through a web browser pointed at any node.
Cluster Management
This release of CAStor enhances cluster management and provides features that allows an administrator to build large, robust clusters. To support large clusters, CAStor 2.0 adds support for network booting, centralized configuration files, and SNMP enhancements that improve the monitoring and management capabilities of CAStor clusters. These include additional performance and capacity metrics and the addition of cluster-wide actions for controlling all nodes in the cluster with a single request.
Local Area Replication for DR
Local area replication (LAR) allows an administrator to create sub-clusters in CAStor. These sub-clusters are logical partitions within a CAStor cluster that are used to define storage distribution strategies. LAR sub-clusters are useful to split a cluster based on location (data cabinet, building location) or to group nodes based on common infrastructure (network, power).
Wide Area Replication for DR and distributed availability
CAStor 2.0 introduces wide area replication for disaster recovery and distributed content availability. This feature provides the mechanism to replicate the contents of a CAStor cluster to a remote cluster e.g., for disaster recovery (DR). Since the network connections between the primary and the DR locations are typically slow, CAStor's wide area replication mechanism has been designed to operate with intermittent, long-haul network links.
Performance Building upon the solid performance base of previous releases, Caringo continues to improve the performance of CAStor. The release includes substantial performance increases for small and medium file writes and reads. Additionally, network protocol enhancements allow for the creation of CAStor clusters in excess of 1,000 nodes.
Anchor Streams
An anchor stream is a special purpose updateable object identified by an immutable UUID (unique identifier) where a user can store and update information such as database backups and lists of UUIDs to prevent loss. Anchor Streams are useful for backups and system recovery. You can save a UUID in a safe location and continue writing to that same UUID for each new version of a backup. For recovery, simply access the original UUID for your backup.
"There's no shortage of options for continuous data protection for primary storage, but securing secondary and archived data, and keeping it instantly accessible on demand is outside the scope of existing systems," said Mark Goros, Caringo CEO. "These enhancements become essential when one considers putting into place long term, high performance, scalable storage with a very low cost of ownership today and in the future. In fact, this is a system that will become less expensive over time as commodity CPU and disk hardware prices fall." Moreover, the overall cost picture will remain unmarred by the limited expansion or mandatory HW migrations that are so typical for bundled HW/SW offerings.
CAStor 2.0 retains the innovative CAStor features that reinvented the CAS market just one year ago. Standard, commodity disk hardware is deployed as a content addressed data store for a fraction of the price of proprietary CAS systems. CAStor is self-healing, managing and configuring, uses no proprietary APIs, and presents no limitations in adding nodes and storage in real time.
About Caringo
Caringo, Inc. has re-imagined content addressed storage from the ground up. CAStor is third-generation technology that leverages the customer's choice of commodity hardware to dramatically improve the scope and economics of corporate fixed content storage. Caringo founders operate according to Einstein's belief that "Things should be made as simple as possible." Rather than make CAS complex and expensive, Caringo makes it affordable, scalable, fast and easy. More information can be found at www.caringo.com.
SOURCE: Caringo, Inc.