M+E Connections

Caringo recently rolled out several enhancements to its Swarm object-based storage platform and more improvements are on the Austin, Texas-based company’s “roadmap,” according to product manager Eric Dey.

“We continuously are enhancing our product and all the components within it,” he said in a June 21 webinar called “What’s New in Caringo Swarm Object Storage.”

Enhancements that were recently added, as part of the Swarm 9.2 release, improved the ease of maintenance, data access and data management, including an expansion of metadata typing, S3 (Simple Storage Service) multipart listing compatibility improvements, volume upgrades and management simplification, and performance and stability improvements, the company said.

“We’re continually working on compatibility improvements” for the S3 protocol that he called a “moving target” because it’s “always being evolved” by Amazon Web Services, and Caringo sees it as important to keep up with those changes, Dey said on the webinar.

Support for Network File System (NFS) version 4 file sharing was another key addition that he made note of. He also cited “all the fixes, tweaks and too-small-to-mention items in the system” that were part of the enhancements.

There will be another “set of major updates” to Swarm before the end of this year, he said. Beyond that, he said, Caringo intends to meet the needs of its customers as their needs continue to evolve.

Over the “next several months,” we can expect to see “some major enhancements with regard to” the Cluster Services Node (CSN) platform for managing the infrastructure within Caringo’s system, he said. “To make that component name more meaningful than CSN, we’re actually going to shift to calling it the platform server,” he said, adding: “It’s still going to serve the role that it always has served. But it’s also now … going to be based upon new technology and it’s going to get an expanded mission.”

As part of that expanded mission, CSN is “going to grow beyond just managing the storage cluster itself; it’s going to grow into managing more aspects of the system” and start managing other services “within our solution,” he explained.

New customers “will be able to make use of it for their deployments” and Caringo will also make an upgrade available to existing users so they can also take advantage of the new technology and next-generation platform server, he said.

“You should also look for us to continue our emphasis on” Caringo’s HTML5 user interfaces, he said, adding: “It’s not just about administering the storage. It’s also about administering the content and giving the users the capability to manage their own content in the system.” Expect the company to “continue bringing together the storage administration with content administration, and blending that together seamlessly within the same user interface,” he said.

Last, “look for us to have a meaningful approach to hybrid clouds,” he said. By that, he explained that he meant “something that is more imaginative than just dump your old junk into a public cloud and get it out of your system,” which he noted is “an approach that I’ve seen from others in the marketplace” and “not data management.” The best approach is one that truly uses the “powerful” features that the cloud offers, including analytics, and allows the experience to be “seamless” for users, he said.

The company now has more than 500 customers, Adrian Herrera, VP of marketing, said on the webinar.