Caringo Brings Enterprise Object Storage to OpenStack

Caringo, Inc. announced the availability of CAStor for OpenStack, software that enhances the OpenStack Swift object servers by integrating CAStor – Caringo’s enterprise-ready object storage engine.

The integration maintains OpenStack Swift accounts, containers, authentication and access controls, enabling integration of CAStor with OpenStack’s compute and imaging components.

CAStor brings resource optimization, ease of management and enterprise-grade protection to the object storage component of OpenStack including:

• Savings in disk utilization – CAStor utilizes up to 98% of disk capacity by removing the inefficiencies of file systems. Enterprise-grade integrity can also be achieved with as few as two replicas, saving over 30% in hard drive costs and data center space when compared to Swift object servers.
• Easy installation – The CAStor boot image contains the appliance OS, server code and boots directly on bare metal from a USB key or from a network using PXE. The process is straightforward, simple and no software is written to a hard drive, which means drives are interchangeable and any type or size of drives can be mixed and used in the system.
• Intelligent automation – CAStor includes automation for management and maintenance that enables plug-and-play expansion, provisioning, automated storage balancing and retiring and upgrading hardware with no downtime. One system administrator without specialized storage expertise can manage multiple petabytes of storage.
• Rapid recovery – A health monitor continuously checks data integrity, cardinality (number of copies), and hardware status. If an issue is detected, all available servers in CAStor aid in the recovery. This means that recovery times decrease the larger the CAStor object store grows which reduces exposure to data integrity issues.
• Governance and compliance – Policy-based replication and duration can be set per object and is automatically enforced. Users also have the option to leverage Caringo Content Router to enable high availability options to safeguard data by mirroring between object stores powered by CAStor in one or many distributed locations.
• Adaptive power consumption – CAStor includes patent-pending adaptive power conservation technology – Darkive – that monitors storage system operations and automatically spins down disks and reduces CPU utilization. Darkive can save up to 35% in power and cooling costs when factored into the overall storage infrastructure.
• Enterprise support – Caringo offers integration and technical support via e-mail or telephone with knowledgeable support staff.

"Bringing CAStor to the OpenStack platform gives users the option to choose an object storage solution that makes OpenStack Swift easier to manage, increases data integrity and offers high availability," said Mark Goros, CEO at Caringo. "Our focus is object storage and users of the combined solution can now rely on the industrial strength and dependability of CAStor to keep their content safe, available and compliant while still benefiting from the tremendous progress the OpenStack community continues to make."

The beta version of CAStor for OpenStack is available.