ParaScale, Inc., a startup offering software solutions enabling cloud storage, announced today that its ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software has entered broad customer trials. Targeted at service providers and enterprises that require better solutions for file storage, management and distribution, PCS is a software-only solution that includes advanced features and capabilities to create, manage and power cloud storage. “Market interest in cloud storage is extremely high, as IT administrators grapple with challenges of exploding digital data. While this problem is acute in the media, oil and gas, and genomic industries, the pain is being felt in industries across the board,” said Noemi Greyzdorf, storage analyst, IDC. “Next-gen NAS solutions, like the one from ParaScale, will appeal to enterprise users looking to deploy economical private cloud deployments within their own firewall and managed by their own people. Such clustered NAS technologies will also enable service providers to deploy public clouds, without having to develop the technology on their own, as interest in storage as a service picks up.” ParaScale Cloud Storage Software Instead of implementing a strategy where every node knows everything about every action, the ParaScale architecture leverages central metadata control servers that are out of the data path. This centralization provides many benefits and enables new levels of scalability as storage nodes can focus on serving read and write requests without needing confirmation from peers. Mixing and matching of heterogeneous commodity hardware gives users the ability to expand when necessary based on current economies of scale while providing perpetual data availability. ParaScale is full featured cloud storage software with key differences from existing clustered NAS solutions that have been designed typically for supercomputing applications. Key differentiating highlights include:

• Asymmetric architecture with central metadata control servers that are out of the data path;
• Highly available control nodes with real-time metadata sharing and automatic failover;
• Massively scalable as storage nodes can focus on serving read and write requests without needing confirmation from peers, a key difference versus existing NAS clusters for high-performance computing;
• Support for heterogeneous commodity hardware with different performance and capacity profiles in a single cloud; and
• The ability to expand/upgrade the cloud when necessary over decades based on current economies of scale while providing perpetual data availability

“The trial will demonstrate for customers how ParaScale software can be used to cobble together standard servers from multiple vendors, including older servers that are ready to be decommissioned, into a self-managing cloud, adding capacity and removing nodes on the fly,” said Cameron Bahar, CTO and co-founder, ParaScale, Inc. “For the first time, end-users and service providers can download software off the web, and have a scale-out NAS solution ready to store data in under an hour.” Platform Support and Availability ParaScale Cloud Storage runs in user space on multiple standard Linux servers. PCS is immediately available for public trial. For more information about participation details, please visit its Web site.