Next Gen Content Addressable Storage

January 31st, 2007: Paul Carpentier, known as the “father of the Content Addressing concept” is doing the rounds and promoting his new invention, CASstor at Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007 Conference on February 12-14, 2007 in Berlin.

Carpentier is the man who sold the content addressable storage (CAS) prototype, FilePool to EMC for a cool $50 million in 2001. After further development this came to be known as Centera, which EMC positioned as an archiving application which had the dual effect of protecting their high speed, high-end SAN and NAS business while spawning an entirely new industry.

Content addressable storage in its most basic form enables the storage of information that is retrievable based on content rather than location. It is well-suited to storing content that will not change, such as email, invoices and other documents required to be kept by law. With the power to search content fast, as well as the unique location given to each new file, it is a useful tool to help organisations meet compliance requirements. As an amended or new file is created, a “hash” representing that file is also created to ensuring that each file remains unique; any changes will generate a new hash.

Carpentier will be promoting Caringo’s next generation CASstor system in the context of SharePoint 2007 and explaining how traditional storage architectures are ill-equipped to deal with storing and protecting large chunks of unstructured information (rich media and documents) that are typically stored on DAS/NAS/SAN systems.

Caringo says the process to install the software solution for fixed content storage involves plugging in the CASstor USB memory key into a node. The software then generates a running CASstor server in under 60 seconds. Users can scale CASstor up to hundreds of nodes; these are automatically configured and clusters are managed. Newer nodes can be provisioned while the system is still running, eliminating the need to migrate data or do any conversions.

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