Ramon Chen, VP Product Management
With the unparalleled explosion of unstructured content in the form of documents, emails, images and video, object storage has been rapidly gaining popularity as a leading method for enterprises and ISVs for defining new cloud storage solutions, big data repositories and general storage infrastructure.
Unlike a block-oriented interface that reads and writes fixed sized blocks of data, object storage organizes data into flexible-sized data containers. Each object has both data and metadata describing the object. Its simplicity makes it perfect for managing, retaining and allowing access to unstructured data, with a goal of delivering performance, flexibility and robustness. Object-based storage breaks the barriers of file system limitations, making it as an alternative to Network Attached Storage (NAS), tape and Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL). The only caveat to storing data at an object level is the inability to query or access structured data at a fine grain level.
With structured (relational data) and semi-structured (logs, delimited data) data growing just as rapidly, enterprises have been left to seek complementary file-based options to object-based storage to cover all their big data retention needs until now.
Today we announced that we have ported and certified the RainStor Big Data Retention database to run on Caring’s leading object store CAStor. Caringo has over 400 customers ranging from SMBs to Fortune 500 companies. With the integration, RainStor continues to demonstrate the ability to run on any form of storage environment and hardware configuration. RainStor is the only database to allow fine-grained query and accessibility using standard SQL and BI tools on CAStor.
The combination allows both unstructured and structured Big Data to be retained and accessed from a single environment improving compliance and search of related data. For example a Healthcare organization could store their patient medical images as well as patient documents and structured database medical records for years or decades on CAStor.
Partnering with Caringo made perfect sense from an architectural perspective; we share the philosophy of the lowest possible TCO through simplicity in administration and choice of commodity hardware and storage. In addition both of our products are ideally suited for cloud-based deployments. The low TCO should be of particular interest to ISVs or hosted/cloud service providers to allow them to offer new data retention services while boosting their margins through efficiencies such as RainStor’s market-leading compression that can be applied to both user data as well as internal logs.
Until now, different environments were required to handle the most efficient retention of unstructured and structured data. Now with RainStor and Caringo, we believe we have solved the object of Big Data retention.