Caringo has introduced Caringo® SwarmNFS, the first lightweight file protocol converter to bring the benefits of scale-out object storage — including built-in data protection, high-availability, and powerful metadata — to NFSv4. Unlike cumbersome file gateways and file connectors, SwarmNFS is a stateless Linux® process that integrates directly with Caringo Swarm — allowing mount points to be accessed across campus, across country or across the world. The patent-pending technology delivers a truly global namespace across NFSv4, S3, HDFS, and SCSP/HTTP, delivering data distribution and data management at scale without the high cost and complexity of legacy solutions.
The power behind SwarmNFS lies in the innovative patent-pending protocol conversion approach that streams data in parallel between native NFSv4 applications and Caringo Swarm scale-out storage. This eliminates the need for spooling and staging, significantly reducing the disk, CPU and RAM needed for native file support. Additionally, this approach eliminates the bottlenecks present in existing connector and gateway solutions. The result is a stateless process that can be rapidly deployed and requires a fraction of the hardware resources of a gateway.
“What Caringo has done with SwarmNFS is bring the ease of data distribution, retention, and accessibility of object storage within reach of any organization,” said Scott Sinclair of ESG. “By seamlessly integrating one of the most pervasive file standards with their metadata approach and search, they have created an incredibly powerful tool chest for application developers to work with large amounts of data.”
SwarmNFS enables new use cases for object storage. Organizations can use existing native NFS file-based applications without the need to customize them first. This allows users to reap the benefits of a limitless pool of scale-out storage with built-in data protection in areas including content distribution, video surveillance, research, big data, digital curation and document management.
Among the benefits of SwarmNFS are:
• Improves productivity with data portability between NFSv4, S3, SCSP, HTTP and HDFS protocols
• Uses 80% less resources (compared to gateway and connector solutions) with no single points of failure
• Brings the power of metadata to files, eliminating the need for a metadata database
• Lowers Total Cost of Ownership of data distribution at scale with the benefits of Swarm object storage
“Gateway products are really trying to mimic traditional file systems. That is a dead-end technology: expensive to build and maintain and it doesn’t scale well,” said Jonathan Ring, Caringo CEO and Co-Founder. “SwarmNFS provides native NFS throughput and a true universal address space so you can eliminate all caching and spooling. This is the most cost- and resource-efficient way to enable economical data distribution, management and universal access at scale for organizations.”
