PCS

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, 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 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.

“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]