The Cloud Does NAS

By employing his company''s “shrink-wrapped cloud-storage software,” ParaScale CEO Sajai Krishnan says that content producers can turn commodity Linux storage servers into high-throughput arrays. ParaScale''s PCS software is free when used on storage systems with capacities less than 4TB.

Clouds—whether for computing or storage—rule as the hot tech trend of 2009.

Call it the network effect: the ability of networked storage—whether over a local intranet or the Internet—to multiply in value, cutting the real costs of buying and maintaining high-end arrays by making them virtual.

Storage virtualization such as Amazon Web Services'' S3 (Simple Storage Service) cloud works by abstracting the physical location of the data. Instead of attaching a cable to a specific storage array in a specific location, Amazon sells users a logical space for data storage. The user doesn''t have to know the specifics of where that data storage is—it could be in Chicago or Shanghai—as Amazon''s compute engine itself handles the process of mapping the request to store bits of data to an actual physical location.

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By writing an efficient application programming interface (API) to allow users fast access to their Internet-based storage, Nirvanix''s Storage Delivery Network customers Market7 and MediaSilo are developing collaborative online edit spaces that offer new styles of production and distribution (see Is the Cloud Right for You?).

Recently, startup ParaScale delivered a less-expensive, easier-to-deploy Linux-based software app to enable users to build their own local cloud-storage array. ParaScale Cloud Storage (PCS) software, which was announced at the end of March, enables users to cobble together dozens or even hundreds of commodity servers to act as a massively scalable, high-availability array.

“The good news is you can start very small,” says ParaScale CEO Sajai Krishnan. Users don''t have to start at the petabyte level to see useful results, nor do they have to “believe our marketing Kool-Aid,” Krishnan says, since use of the software on setups that are less than 4TB is free via a download from the company''s website. The software runs on data servers using either Red Hat Linux or CentOS freeware Linux that connect via simple Gigabit Ethernet routers and networks to just about any server capable of running Linux.

While Sony Pictures Imageworks uses high-availability, high-throughput storage arrays from vendors including Netop and Isilon, the Culver City, Calif.-based studio is currently beta testing ParaScale Cloud Storage software running on off-the-shelf Linux servers.

“We''ve been using [commodity HP] workstations that are significantly cheaper than the SGI ones that we used years ago,” says Nicholas Bali, Sony Pictures Imageworks senior systems engineer. “Our render farm, meanwhile, is a mixture of standard workstations from Dell, Verari, and IBM. But we haven''t been able to make that same sort of shift to commodity hardware in our storage servers. ParaScale allows us to choose commodity hardware and drive down our cost of storage.”