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Scality Expands Team In New York Office, Appoints Eric Craig As Sales Chief

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Cloud storage system company Scality has appointed Eric Craig as North American Sales Director.

He comes to Scality from SunGard Availability Services, a $1.5 billion enterprise software company providing cloud security and disaster recovery where, as Vice President of Sales, he developed a highly productive channel and reseller network. Prior to that, while at Current Analysis, Craig delivered six straight quarters of growth.

Earlier in his career he led the building of a new sales organization for Cable & Wireless/SAVVIS and led the Qwest Communications launch into advanced IP services.

Scality is the developer of RING, an application centric cloud storage system, enabling cloud storage to scale up to exabytes using commodity server hardware with direct attached storage.

ParaScale Forecasts Cloud Storage Opportunities for Service Providers and Hosting Companies

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Cloud applications, computing, and storage are just emerging on the scene, yet there is a rapid heightening of interest in all things cloud. Google and Amazon popularized the concept, now businesses of all sizes and types are interested in its potential. With the availability of cloud storage-enabling solutions, many service providers and hosting companies are investigating new cloud storage service offerings.

Sajai Krishnan, CEO of ParaScale, a start-up company developing cloud storage software, believes the impact of cloud technologies will be transformational and cloud will be a major way by which IT is consumed in the future. For service providers, this presents tremendous opportunity, as well as challenges.

Krishnan asserts that the public cloud storage service provider market is beginning to segment. Segment one includes the mass-market cloud service providers like Amazon S3, Google, Rackspace, and a few others. Segment two consists of the sophisticated enterprise cloud service providers who are rapidly creating new services that are combining virtualization, multi-tenant storage cloud and compute cloud service and private hosted clouds. Segment three is comprised of the giant telcos such as AT&T, Verizon Business, and Deutsche Telecom.

“Most manage hosters and service providers will need to determine their strategy for winning business in the second segment of contenders,” said Krishnan. “While the cloud services market is going to provide upside for many years, service providers must have a well thought-out entry strategy to succeed. Surprisingly, a number of mid-sized new entrants are considering a “build and they will come” approach and launching into segment one. This is a recipe for a “build and you will get run-over” scenario, as the goliaths of segment one already have first mover advantage and tremendous economies of scale.”

Krishnan identifies several considerations for service providers and managed hosting companies as they develop their cloud storage services offering. These include:

  • Evaluate your customers and their data needs.
  • What amount of data do you intend to store for your customers?
  • What sustainable differentiator should you base your business on?
  • What cloud services are already available and how will you compete?
  • If you succeed, is the business and architecture going to scale?

Regardless of how the service provider answers the above business questions, the systematic approach to evaluate cloud storage technologies remains the same:

  • A cloud storage solution has three key parts. Research the options to ensure a full storage cloud solution.
  • Choose a cloud solution that can start small with a few TBs and scale up.
  • Avoid proprietary interfaces and APIs.
  • Determine if your preferred cloud storage solution can offer data access via familiar enterprise protocols.
  • Do you have an opportunity to offer differentiated cloud storage integrated application services? Can your cloud storage platform help you deliver this high value service?
  • Cloud is about scale. Ensure that your cloud data access protocol can scale as your business grows.
  • Always perform a proof of concept within your own environment.

NaviSites Selects Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform

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Mezeo has announced that NaviSite has selected the Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform to power its cloud storage solutions.

Already in use by trusted service providers on three continents, Mezeo’s Cloud Storage Platform is building on its reputation by being easy to deploy, highly scalable and highly secure. Its well-designed APIs deliver platform extensibility while its unmatched accessibility includes an integrated Windows desktop, rich Web 2.0 browsers and iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile native client access.

The Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform enables trusted service providers like NaviSite to leverage their own storage infrastructure to quickly and cost-effectively enter the rapidly growing cloud storage services market under their own brand.

Global Availability Of ParaScale Cloud Storage Announced

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ParaScale announced today the immediate global availability of ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software. As a software-only solution that can be downloaded from the web and applied to any standard Linux platform, PCS enables hundreds of commodity servers to be clustered together to act as a file repository with massive capacity and parallel throughput. PCS is being used by leading enterprise and service provider organizations including Blue Coat Systems, Carpathia Hosting, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Stanford Genome Technology Center.

By combining ParaScale software and buyer selected standard servers, managed service providers can build different types of public clouds and offer a variety of storage cloud services, while enterprises can start small and build their own private, corporate clouds inside their own firewall.

In one example, Sony Pictures Imageworks is testing PCS to see how a private storage cloud might better the economics of its storage intensive infrastructure. “We have been working with ParaScale since early in the beta process and we are impressed with the technology and flexibility of the software. Having evaluated many storage technologies over the years, we are optimistic about finding a potential solution that scales in capacity and performance and targets our content heavy workloads, all the while leveraging standard Linux hardware,” said Nick Bali, senior systems engineer.

By working closely with partners, ParaScale looks to change the economics of storage-intensive solutions in many industries, and thus deliver strong ROI to customers. Vembu Technologies and South River Technologies have embraced ParaScale’s cloud software and are working with ParaScale to implement end-to-end cloud management solutions.

ParaScale software will soon be available through a broad range of value-added resellers. Resellers recognize that commodity-scaled, easy to manage and grow file storage has a thousand use-cases in any IT environment whether the customer is thinking clouds or not.

ParaScale Cloud Storage software version 1.2 is available for immediate purchase and can be downloaded here: http://www.parascale.com. Pricing is based on the physical capacity within the cloud with deployments starting in North America at a list price of $1.05/GB.

Parascale Raises $11+ Million In Series A Funding For Linux Cloud Storage

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Parascale, a provider of cloud storage solutions for rich media content in traffic-intensive applications, today announced that it has closed an $11.37 million Series A financing round led by venture capital firms Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

Parascale

Parascale plans to use the funding for product development and marketing initiatives in preparation for the launch of Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS), an application that aggregates disk storage on multiple standard Linux servers providing one highly scalable storage cloud, accessible via standard file access protocols.

According to the news release, Parascale has developed a new class of storage solutions designed to support the wave of content-intensive applications, including video-on-demand, digital document archiving, scientific data analysis, video surveillance and medical image remote diagnosis among others. The company’s PCS software is patented technology which automatically and transparently migrates and replicates files among storage nodes to balance and optimize performance – without interruption in client access.

Parascale PCS

“With Charles River Ventures and Menlo Ventures, we have the two premier investors in the storage space supporting our company,” said Sajai Krishnan, Parascale CEO. “In the very specific technology domain where Parascale operates , clustered storage, Charles River’s success with EqualLogic has been the best clustered SAN-storage exit. Menlo’s investment in Spinnaker Networks has been arguably the best clustered NAS-storage exit. It is an honor to have Bruce Sachs of Charles River and John Jarve of Menlo on our board. Their voting with their wallets in leading the Series A round, is an affirmation of Parascale’s team, business model and opportunity.”

[Source: ByteandSwitch]