Appistry Launches CloudIQ Storage

Appistry, Inc., in enterprise cloud platform, announced the latest edition to the Appistry CloudIQ Platform family, Appistry CloudIQ Storage. CloudIQ Storage provides a dynamically scalable, fault-tolerant and low cost storage system for files and binary objects.

CloudIQ Storage may be used as a stand-alone cloud storage system or in conjunction with Appistry CloudIQ Engine to enable Computational Storage. Computational storage unifies applications and data by storing data across commodity servers and intelligently migrating application processing to the machines containing the relevant data. As a result, computational storage allows for the delivery of data-intensive applications at unprecedented price points.

With the addition of CloudIQ Storage, Appistry significantly extends the lead for its market-leading platform. Now the first enterprise cloud application platform to bring flexible file storage to private and hybrid clouds, Appistry CloudIQ Platform delivers the next-generation of platform-as-a-service, today, and enables a new generation of highly scalable, extremely reliable, data-centric applications to be delivered at a fraction of the time, cost and complexity of traditional approaches.

Product Overview:

• Massive Scale File Storage: Appistry CloudIQ Storage is architected for petabyte scale, featuring a fully-distributed architecture with no single point of failure or network bottlenecks. CloudIQ Storage can easily service web-scale data sets and load by distributing files and requests across multiple machines.
• Intelligent: Traditional application architectures rely on the transfer of data files over expensive and bandwidth-constrained interconnects to be processed by application logic. CloudIQ Storage, by contrast, allows servers to be used for computational purposes as well as for file storage. This capability, coupled with CloudIQ Platform’s ability to intelligently locate application processing on the machines containing the relevant data is called computational storage. Computational Storage enables the dramatic reduction of capital and operating costs and improved performance for unparalleled price-performance for high-throughput applications.
• Low Cost: CloudIQ Storage-based systems are extremely cost-effective, requiring only industry-standard, off-the-shelf commodity-grade servers and networking.
• Bullet-Proof Reliability: CloudIQ Storage allows users to specify policies governing the replication of data within the system, enabling high levels of fault tolerance. CloudIQ Storage oversees system health and can take appropriate action upon disk or server failure.
• Self-Organizing and Optimizing: Users can incrementally scale the capacity of a running CloudIQ Storage system by adding new servers and storage, without downtime or loss of file availability. CloudIQ Storage is self-organizing, automatically balancing disk utilization across machines, ensuring maximal efficiency and eliminating hot-spots.
• Geographically Aware: CloudIQ Storage can span multiple data centers. CloudIQ Storage is geographically aware, mirroring and distributing files based on policy so that the loss of any one data center does not limit access to data.
• HDFS Compatible: A special Hadoop Edition of CloudIQ Storage, also announced today, provides plug-and-play compatibility with the popular open source project.

Market Perspective:

• File-based data is the life-blood of many of today’s enterprise, SaaS, Web 2.0, and social-networking applications. Traditional file storage solutions like NAS and SAN, while effective at small scale processing, are prohibitively expensive for web-scale applications. The exorbitant pricing of traditional storage solutions makes distributed approaches based on inexpensive commodity infrastructure an attractive proposition for many enterprises and service providers.
• With traditional application architectures, application processing and data storage are each deployed on their own islands of infrastructure, separated by relatively thin and expensive pipes. As a result, data access bandwidth is typically the key performance bottleneck for applications that must process large volumes of data.
• CloudIQ Storage, with its unique computational storage capability, enables a smarter approach to delivering data-intensive applications. By moving application workloads to the data on which they work, most data access happens within machine boundaries, at SATA bus speeds. And because processing and data access happen across many machines in parallel, each incremental machine adds to aggregate storage bandwidth, as opposed to further subdividing it.
• Cloud-based storage approaches are a growing priority for IT organizations. According to research by Gartner, Inc. (2009 Data Center Conference Poll Results: Cloud Storage, Adam W. Couture, January 21, 2010) referring to instant polling results taken at its 2009 Data Center conference, “About one-third of attendees plan to implement private storage clouds in the next 12 months.”

“Storage is an integral component of today’s data-centric applications. It’s no surprise then that traditional approaches to storage are often to blame for the high cost and inferior performance of many a mission-critical application,” said Kevin Haar, CEO, Appistry. “With Appistry CloudIQ Storage, we are able to unify application processing and storage requirements to the cloud to dramatically reduce total costs and improve overall performance. This is a natural extension of the Appistry CloudIQ Platform and another step towards the realization of our vision for next-generation PaaS for the enterprise.”

“Appistry’s new cloud storage offering allows for better management and control of mission-critical data-intensive applications. This capability can avoid bottlenecking associated with manipulating large data sets," said Kevin Jackson, engineering fellow, NJVC. "Simply put, Appistry CloudIQ Storage represents a smarter and cheaper approach to storage.”

“Next Century focuses on providing at-a-glance information to decision makers based on massive amounts of incoming data. Appistry’s CloudIQ Storage provides a way to dynamically and reliably manage the data in the cloud for processing and analysis,” said Clark Dorman, senior software architect for Next Century. “CloudIQ Storage allows our cloud application to perform processing at the data, improving throughput and vastly simplifying data management tasks which in the past required complex programming and expensive infrastructure to deliver.”

Product Availability:
Appistry CloudIQ Storage is currently in private beta with anticipated availability in Spring 2010.