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My company went through a long bake-off process this past Summer to select a technology partner for our cloud storage service. What is cloud storage? Basically it is cheap, reliable, tier-2, file-based storage that is accessible via several storage protocols. We ended up selecting Parascale for a couple reasons.
First, Parascale offered a platform that combined software with a commodity hardware storage architecture. We didn’t have to buy a commercial SAN or worry about how to scale a storage platform.
Second, Parascale was very responsive to our feedback. They understood that the needs of a service provider are different than a traditional enterprise. Finally, their pricing structure was very competitive and allowed us to build a workable business model.
Parascale recently released a press release based on an interview with me.
Jon Greaves from Carpathia Hosting described an interesting hybrid-cloud analogy relating hosting service offerings to the auto industry. I heard Jon present this analogy during a webinar sponsored by storage cloud vendor Parascale this week.
- Colocation = purchase a car, maintain a car yourself
- Managed services = lease a car, lease holder maintains the car
- Cloud computing = rent a car by the hour/day
You could also say that colocation is like owning a condo, managed services like renting an apartment, and cloud computing like a hotel room. And hopefully that hotel room isn’t like those rooms that are rented by-the-hour. 
I’ve often told people that I’d love to be able to scale storage the way Google does.
Data storage architectures don’t get the kind of recognition they should by information architects. Storage really serves as the foundation for every application service — email, video streaming, data warehousing, or twittering. The challenge with building a storage architecture is that at some point you know you are going to outgrow it. Most storage vendors ask you to perform a forklift upgrade of your storage devices in order to scale your growth.
I’ve been alpha testing a promising storage technology by a company called Parascale. Their technology lets you take commodity servers connected to storage and form them into a cloud architecture. I like what I see so far and I have been impressed by my interactions with their development team. This technology is not designed to replace high-performance SANs. But it is perfectly suitable for tier-2 data storage applications. Stay tuned…
