ParaScale Unveils Open Private Cloud Storage Platform

Cloud storage software provider ParaScale on Nov. 16 released a new, downloadable version of its product that it describes as an open private cloud storage platform for Linux servers.
PCS (ParaScale Cloud Storage Software) R2.0, which becomes available on Nov. 30, can be utilized on commodity hardware running Linux-either Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS or CentOS-and “can integrate applications directly onto storage nodes,” Jack Norris, vice president of marketing and business development for ParaScale, told eWEEK.
“When we say ‘open,’ we mean user-selected commodity hardware,” Norris said. “It doesn’t matter what the user has or wants to use; this will run on it.”
The main news in this PCS R2.0 release, Norris said, involves several new features in Web services integration.
“We’re selling to service providers who host private clouds, enterprises who have their own internal cloud and large enterprises who are looking at a hybrid kind of opportunity, where they utilize both private and public clouds to consume services,” Norris said.
A key feature of PCS R2.0 is “a backup for virtual machines and their respective data,” ParaScale said in a news release Nov. 17. If a storage drive fails, “the VMs can be booted directly from [the] ParaScale [server] and be up and running quickly again without [anyone] having to move around VM images.”
“We can do this because data in the ParaScale system does not flow through a standard [storage] controller,” Norris said. “It flows through our own server.”
Additional features include, “Web service API expansion through SOAP and REST to provide configuration, administration and provisioning support … synchronous replication based on policy per multitenant instance … private cloud multitenancy support, including metered usage for chargeback … [and] proactive reporting and monitoring capabilities,” the ParaScale release said.
“Pricing is based on the physical capacity within the cloud, with deployments starting in North America at a list price of 95 cents per gigabyte,” ParaScale said. For more information, go here.