New Cheaper Storage Clouds Forming

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While two startups are targeting the cloud for rolling out extremely cheap storage platforms, they’re using different technologies to make it happen.

Parascale’s software turns commodity Linux servers into online storage nodes costing less than a piece of Bazooka gum these days — about 25 to 50 cents per gigabyte. The four-year-old Cupertino, Calif.-based software developer just completed its first round of venture funding of $11.3 million.

One-year-old Nirvanix is re-inventing the tenured storage service provider (SSP) model as an online storage delivery network (SDN) — a unified, interconnected global platform of storage nodes costing 25 cents per gigabyte. Intel is a major investor in the company’s $18 million capital fund.

The upstarts are the latest pushing into a crowded online storage market but are fearless in facing off against established players such as Google, Amazon and EMC’s Mozy.

One reason is that Nirvanix isn’t looking to add backup capabilities like Mozy does, or hit the consumer market that Amazon targets, Edgard Capdevielle, vice president of business development, told InternetNews.com.

“When you go to the cloud you’re facing delay in data transmission and latency and that’s why we don’t house SAN data. We’re looking to house the preserved data where access delays won’t be an issue,” Capdevielle told InternetNews.com.

Google and Amazon, according to Parascale’s CEO Saja Krishnan, provide different solutions when it comes to single file performance requirements — a requirement the technology is not looking to provide.

“We are not the panacea for everything storage. Some solutions are suitable for transactional or engineering files and different access needs. That’s not us,” Krishnan told InternetNews.com.

Yet market entrance could still pose some challenges for new players.

While economics is a compelling reason to reach for the cloud, some enterprises are still concerned about handing off data.

After all that was a primary reason Google acquired Postini this year. Postini software encrypts, archives and enforces policies for e-mail, instant messaging and other Web-based communications.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.