Parascale – Powering Cloud Storage

Author: Parascale

Understanding Public and Private cloud storage

Cloud storage is a relatively new concept that is becoming a more recognizable term in the industry vernacular. It is defined by three characteristics. First, the storage service must be over a network. Second, the storage pool must be easy to scale transparently without downtime. Third, the storage pool must be easy to manage especially at scale.

The difference between a public cloud and a private cloud is simple. A public cloud is offered as a service, usually over an internet connection. Public cloud providers charge a monthly usage fee which is usually per GB of stored data plus bandwidth transfer charges. Private clouds are built within the firewall and managed by the user organization itself.

For a cloud storage white paper and audio/video guides to public and private clouds please visit the Cloud Storage Technology section of the ParaScale website.

The ParaScale Cloud Storage Solution
ParaScale provides a cloud storage solution that can be used by enterprises to create their own public or private clouds. The cloud storage software runs in user space on any off the shelf commodity server running standard Linux and forms a highly scalable self-managing storage cloud with massive capacity and parallel throughput. The ParaScale storage cloud consists of multiple cooperating servers that fall into one of two types – one or two control nodes and multiple storage nodes. The Control Nodes are the brains of the cloud and orchestrate the replication, migration and deletion of files within the cloud. Storage Nodes are the machines that own the underlying storage volumes and provide access to those files using remote access protocols, based on instructions from the Control Nodes. The cloud talks standard storage protocols like NFS, HTTP, FTP and WebDav, and appears as a regular NAS device to the infrastructure. To understand how to download the ParaScale software and build a free 4TB cloud please visit the Evaluating ParaScale section of the ParaScale website.

Advantages of the ParaScale Storage Cloud
• The storage cloud is easy to install with self discovering nodes that can be configured on any commodity storage from your favorite vendor.
• The cloud has no bottlenecks as each storage node in the cloud can independently serve requests.
• Features like replication, load balancing and capacity balancing reduce administrative overheads and costs. This makes the cloud storage solution largely self managing and a single administrator can manage a petabyte scale cloud.
To understand these and other features built into the cloud to facilitate management please visit the Management and Automation section of the ParaScale website.

Cloud Storage Workloads
The following section lists out the workloads where the ParaScale cloud storage solution is a good fit.
• Service providers creating Hosted Public clouds or Hosted Private Clouds
• Archival Storage & Backup Storage Solutions
• Tier 2 NAS for Media Storage and Content Storage
• Write Once, Consume Many workloads like Hosted Video Servers.
• Data Ingestion workloads for media storage from video cameras or satellites.
To understand workloads where the ParaScale solution is a good fit please visit the Cloud Storage Workloads section of the ParaScale website.

Conclusion
ParaScale is a highly flexible and cost effective alternative to traditional NAS and cluster storage solutions. By deploying the ParaScale cloud storage software within organizations, companies can deploy a massively scalable and cost effective storage solution on their selected commodity hardware. Please register at the Parascale website and download a free 4 TB cloud or try our Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator to analyze and evaluate storage decision costs over the long term. For more information please visit the Parascale website or email sales at [email protected].

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