(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — When enterprise hosting provider Carpathia Hosting (www.carpathiahosting.com) launched its managed cloud hosting product set in June of this year, it emphasized its focus on providing a “hybrid” cloud computing environment – one that would enable customers to combine cloud-based resources with dedicated resources.
This week, cloud storage software startup ParaScale (www.parascale.com) issued an announcement highlighting its product’s involvement as a key component of the cloud storage piece of Carpathia’s cloud storage offering.
Carpathia’s chief technology officer Jon Greaves says the company began its engagement with ParaScale this time last year, becoming involved in the closed beta for the product, then the open beta. ParaScale became generally available in April of 2009, and Carpathia’s cloud platform launched in June – already supporting about a dozen active customers – with ParaScale as a key component.
According to ParaScale’s press release, Carpathia evaluated a long list of technologies when building its cloud solution, and brought a clear set of criteria to the process.
There were several major points among those criteria, says Greaves, the first of which was addressed by ParaScale’s ability to be deployed on more or less any type of server hardware. This enabled Carpathia to do its own benchmarking and construct a storage system capable of reaching very large scale.
“If you take a 24-slot box with 1.5 or 2 terrabyte drives,” says Greaves, “you can get up to petabyte standards of storage very quickly.” He says Carpathia has reached 20 petabytes of storage across its nine data centers, at this point.
The ParaScale software also doesn’t require a custom OS image, and can run on Red Hat or CentOS, which enabled Carpathia to operate other applications on the same hardware storing the cloud files. The company has used this circumstance to deploy a virus protection system on the cloud storage hardware, along with a system that enables the storage servers to act as CDN origin servers, making a layer of content delivery infrastructure unnecessary.
Perhaps most significant – particularly considering the nature of Carpathia’s customers, which tend to be enterprises or government agencies, rather than developers or Web 2.0 types – is the fact that ParaScale delivers a file system that can appear as a more standard piece of the OS, rather than require the use of an API, or any tinkering with applications.
“Where a developer or web 2.0 type user would be willing to go use an API or recode applications or use a web interface to push files to the cloud,” says Greaves, “our customers just want to use storage. They don’t want the headache.”
Because Carpathia emphasizes hybrid solutions that combine cloud infrastructure and storage with dedicated infrastructure pieces, the company also has to provide a cloud storage system that works nicely with virtual and dedicated systems at the same time. Carpathia’s “block storage,” says Greaves, can be presented as a NAS device, and used as common storage by both cloud servers and ordinary physical servers.
“Service providers striving to offer cloud services to their customers need to sort out the hype and understand the strengths and weaknesses of different solutions,” says Cameron Bahar, founder and CTO of ParaScale, quoted in the company’s press release. “Carpathia Hosting wisely developed their service provider strategy and methodically evaluated technologies against the goals of their plan. Today, they have early market advantage and are delivering both private and multi-tenant solutions built on a platform that will seamlessly grow in tandem with their business.”
Greaves and ParaScale CEO Sajai Krishnan will both participate in the panel discussion “Storage Opportunities: Cloud vs. Conventional” at next week’s Hosting Transformation Summit, held by Tier 1 Research (www.t1r.com) in Las Vegas.
