Cachengo Announces Director Local File Server Appliance

Cloud storage start-up Cachengo announced its cloud-based data management solution, a local file server appliance called Director. Aimed at small to medium-size businesses (SMBs), Director serves as the command center for the system’s appliance-to-the-cloud solution that provides SMBs with a bundled approach to data storage and management. At the heart of Cachengo’s solution, Director is a local file server appliance that delivers file sharing compatible with CIFS, NFS and ISCSI protocols and integrates into Microsoft Active Directory, Unix LDAP environments or with stand-alone authentication.

Cachengo’s Director series of products come in two families: the CD100 and CD1200. Both are 1U in height (1.75-in.) and the CD1200 family adds additional capabilities suited for Virtual Server Failover (VSF). VSF provides hypervisor and server protection with 8 TB of data storage, anti-virus, disk-to-disk backup, plus standard and online virtual server backup. Cachengo’s Cloud Service, C25, is an optional service that’s available with all purchases; all C25 customers also benefit from de-duplication, compression and continuous data protection (CDP).

“Small businesses face a daunting challenge. In order to remain agile and competitive, their data management needs have become increasingly sophisticated,” said Mike Young, CEO and founder of Cachengo. “But, their IT staff and budgets have not grown to keep pace, forcing them to make tough decisions about where to spend precious few dollars or allocate resources. Do you invest in top-notch security or disaster recovery protection?”

For added data security and disaster protection, Cachengo’s Cloud Service can be integrated with Director to provide automatic off-site, cloud-based backup storage. Each Cachengo Cloud account is automatically encrypted and isolated at the time of creation to prevent a breach on one account from providing a conduit to other accounts and other appliances within an account. As an added fail-safe, all customer files are immediately collapsed if an intrusion is suspected to ensure that no data is available in the event of a breach.

“Aside from reducing application and service costs by consolidating multiple services into one easy-to-use solution, Cachengo reduces the time invested in managing all these services from multiple vendors,” Young said. “The time savings alone can be a tremendous advantage for businesses with small IT staffs.”

The Cachengo Hive file sharing application, currently in beta and set for official release in a month, enables individuals to securely share files with friends, co-workers, groups or the public by invitation. Similar to the protocol of the popular Facebook social networking site, Hive users can pick and choose which content to share over an encrypted connection and with which individuals or groups on an ad hoc basis. “Hive eliminates the complicated access problems of FTP and the clunky bandwidth consumption of e-mailing large files that can congest the network,” Young said. “With Hive, anyone on the network can share a file with just a few clicks.”