(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — To meet the ever-expanding wealth of data bombarding today’s organizations, cloud storage software solutions developer ParaScale (www.parascale.com) has added advanced features for large-scale data analysis and management with the latest release of its cloud storage platform.
According to its Monday announcement, ParaScale’s Cloud Storage 2.5 software, currently available in beta, provides advanced cloud scale data security, protection and accessibility, as well as features to efficiently address “big data” requirements by enabling data services and application integration directly onto storage nodes.
Enterprise Strategy Group (www.enterprisestrategygroup.com) senior analyst Terri McClure notes that quickly growing data volume is “driving a need for storage that can manage and process large data sets more efficiently and intelligently.”
“The challenge is that the bottleneck has shifted to the network,” McClure said in a statement. “It just doesn’t make sense to move large data sets across the network; it’s much more efficient to bring the processing to the data. With this release, ParaScale is laying the foundation for a new class of application-enabled storage.”
Built to meet the needs of enterprise data centers or managed hosting providers with software that provides a global namespace, thin provisioning and easily incorporates additional storage nodes to scale, release 2.5 of ParaScale Cloud Storage software has added Cloud Scale Data Protection, Cloud Scale Data Security, Advanced Multi-Tenant Virtual File System support, and local data services.
ParaScale’s data integrity protects clients from silent data corruption in both memory and disk with automated self-healing without introducing any bottleneck. Signatures can be stored locally, rather than in the cloud or though a third-party key management, with no central look-up to enable massive scale and better performance.
Also in ensuring data security, management functions such as replication and migration are performed on encrypted content with multiple protocols and algorithms supported.
ParaScale has also added advanced multi-tenancy features including multi-tenant FTP support, enabling each virtual file system to act as a unique FTP server with user authentication against a unique external directory to protect shared file access. Within a VFS, the administrator can define data access privileges, shared protocols, replication policies, encryption support and other customer specific settings.
Finally, given its requirements for handling big data, it is much more efficient to bring the processing to the enterprise storage tier, eliminating the time and management tasks related to moving large datasets across the network to temporary computing clusters. To this end, ParaScale identifies local data on each storage node and supports applications running directly on ParaScale cloud storage nodes.
ParaScale chief executive officer Ken Fehrnstrom summarizes, “The next generation of cloud storage provides a new architecture: One that is optimized to address the demands of large files and fast-growing content with highly scalable, easy-to-use storage. It provides a platform for new enterprise applications to reduce costs and management complexity and drive faster business results. This next generation of cloud storage includes a major paradigm shift – bringing the processing to the data.”
