Content-Addressed Storage Pioneers Join Forces at Caringo; Unveil CAStor Software for Simplified, Hardware-Agnostic Fixed-Content Storage.

AUSTIN, Texas -- Industry pioneers have joined forces and founded a new company dedicated to providing scalable, high performance fixed content storage software, while reducing complexity, vendor lock-in and runaway costs.

Caringo, Inc., named for founders Paul Carpentier, Jonathan Ring and Mark Goros, today announced its flagship product, CAStor(TM), which disrupts the traditional approach to content-addressed storage (CAS). Caringo's CAStor introduces third-generation technology in this first product that incorporates key advantages over more primitive CAS products still employed today for fixed-content storage:

--Hardware agnostic CAStor never requires the user to be locked into expensive, dead-end hardware

--Massively scalable parallel cluster architecture accommodates data growth as needed - even across heterogeneous, evolving hardware

--High performance for primary storage duty, and to support extreme scalability

--Guaranteed data integrity for true long-term storage that is impervious to attack, while auditable and independently provable for evidentiary purposes

--Self-configuring, managing and healing to improve robustness and reduce total cost of ownership

--A standard HTTP interface frees from proprietary APIs and allows access from any platform, from cell phone to mainframe

--Built in disaster recovery, backup and continuous data availability features in a single, integrated software package 

--Architected to prevent bottlenecks, eliminating any single point of failure

--Disruptive, breakthrough pricing model

Carpentier is known to the industry as the inventor of CAS, having first developed the technology 10 years ago, and was the chief architect of the highly acclaimed, breakthrough technology from FilePool, sold to EMC in 2001. Given his 10 years of hands-on experience, Carpentier was uniquely equipped to reengineer CAS for the extreme demands of the 21st century.

"The shortcomings of first-generation CAS are very apparent to storage managers. CAStor is the outcome of the challenge we accepted, which was to develop an architecture so strong it would support an unlimited variety of applications at the performance and scalability levels required today and tomorrow, while delivering full fault resilience and data integrity, yet keeping it as simple as possible," said Carpentier.

"Hardware-agnostic CAS is a bright spot in storage today," said Jon William Toigo, a 20-year IT veteran and consultant, architect and integrator who became an early fan of Caringo after condemning what is often called 'sticky CAS' products from other vendors. "Once you place data that you need to retain for a protracted length of time into a sticky CAS system, the vendors have usually seen to it that you will never be able to buy anyone else's storage but theirs. This limits your choices and perpetuates insane costs by constraining your ability to take advantage of lower-cost, best-of-breed alternatives."

"One of the most compelling aspects of Caringo's approach is that it has the ease of management, low cost and scalability associated with digital archiving storage solutions," said Tony Asaro, senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group. "However, it is also designed to meet the needs of high performance applications. We have too many categories of storage and a convergence is required so that companies can leverage the huge investments they are making in IT infrastructure."

In meeting the goals of simplicity and modernity, Caringo settled on a unique method of delivering CAStor: the software is sold on a bootable USB flash drive that plugs into the user's choice of X86 hardware with a Gigabyte or more of RAM, one or more hard drives and Gigabit Ethernet. Scalability is achieved as simply as booting another node at any point in time.

An important element of CAStor's simplicity is its Zero File System. CAStor creates a single huge, flat address space without hierarchies. Each file is assigned a unique ID for its entire lifetime. Caringo's patent-pending Content Integrity Seal (part of the compliance option) allows you to transparently upgrade the hashing algorithms during operation, without ever changing identifiers or reloading data. This protects against the content attacks and integrity breaches that could threaten current CAS systems. There is no layered, complex - and fragile - file system to inhibit performance or limit scaling. The result is a fundamental innovation in fixed-content storage that lowers TCO by an order of magnitude, yet combines the throughput of primary storage with the integrity guarantees required of compliant long-term archives.

Carpentier serves as Caringo CTO, Jonathan Ring as president and Mark Goros as CEO. Caringo's executive management team has worked together for 16 years, and boasts more than 80 years of combined experience at companies including Oracle, Siebel, IBM, Tandem Computers, Sybase, Gain Technology, TechGnosis, FilePool, Equip Ventures, Comdisco, Cartia, Sentient Ventures, and BroadVision.

While Caringo intends to make CAS technology the centerpiece of its product portfolio, the company founders' pedigrees are already attracting the interest of OEM partners and top-tier vertical solution providers. These partners will integrate CAStor solutions customized for such data-intensive environments as health care, financial services, telecommunications and broadcasting.

About Caringo

Caringo, Inc. has re-imagined content addressed storage software from the ground up. CAStor is third-generation technology that leverages the customer's choice of commodity hardware to dramatically improve the scope and economics of corporate fixed content storage. Caringo founders operate according to Einstein's belief that "Things should be made as simple as possible." Rather than make CAS complex and expensive, Caringo makes it affordable, scalable, fast and easy. More information can be found at www.caringo.com.

Caringo and CAStor are trademarks of Caringo. Other companies and products mentioned herein may be trademarks or trade names of their respective owners.