Caringo Reunites Inventors of CAS

Two engineers who in the late 1980s came up with the idea of the content-addressable storage design—which eventually morphed into EMC's multimillion-dollar Centera high-end storage platform—have been reunited at clustered storage provider Caringo.

The company announced the appointment of Jan Van Riel as its vice president of advanced technology, March 17, a move that reunites him with fellow CAS (content-addressable storage) co-inventor Paul Carpentier, Caringo's co-founder and chief technology officer.

CAS, sometimes called associative storage, stores information so that it can be retrieved based on its content, not its storage location. It is typically used for high-speed storage and retrieval of fixed content, such as documents stored for compliance with government regulations.

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Van Riel, who resides in Antwerp, Belgium, and Carpentier met in 1984 when Carpentier was an engineer at Johnson & Johnson, Van Riel told eWEEK. Later, while they were partners at startup FilePool, they got together to invent the CAS technology.

When the time was right, Van Riel said, they sold their  company to EMC, which incorporated the CAS concept into its multimillion-dollar Centera . 

Van Riel served eight years as EMC's Director of Technology following the acquisition of FilePool, where he was the company's CTO. 

Prior to joining FilePool, Van Riel was vice president of engineering and co-founder of Wave Research with Carpentier, where they invented FileWave, the first automated, model-driven software distribution and management system. 

Before Wave Research, Van Riel led the engineering group as co-founder of Gnosis/Technosis, again with Carpentier, where the two invented SequeLink, the first client/server middleware product to connect heterogeneous front ends to multiple databases.

"With EMC scaling down the Centera unit and the future of Centera unclear, the chance to join Caringo, which understands the potential of CAS, and partner once again with Paul Carpentier was too good of an opportunity to pass up," Van Riel said.  "The need for CAS solutions is ever increasing."

Caringo's flagship CAStor product is a third-generation storage product technology that uses commodity hardware to implement a storage cluster that improves the scope and economics of content storage, a company spokesperson said.

"We are thrilled to bring Jan into the Caringo family and reunite the two 'fathers' of content addressed storage under the same roof once again," said Caringo President Jonathan Ring. "Jan has more than two decades of experience designing and developing new technologies, and his work with Paul has produced seismic changes in the industry."