Caringo has announced major enhancements in its latest version of Swarm object storage software with version 7.5. This new update offers architectural and management features to address issues found in big data storage, web content delivery, and active archive environments.
Caringo has announced major enhancements in its latest version of Swarm object storage software with version 7.5. This new update offers architectural and management features to address issues found in big data storage, web content delivery, and active archive environments.
Caringo Swarm gives its users the ability to turn standard hardware into a reliable pool of shared resources resulting in scalability, performance, data security, and support for all major cloud, file and storage protocols. Caringo also indicated that their software is adaptable to the most demanding enterprise workloads, even with use cases that involve complicated compliance, capacity and availability requirements.
Other Swarm benefits to enterprises include the ability to use the servers, hard drive technology or network of choice as it allows users to seamlessly add new hardware and allows the mixing of node types, hardware vendors, and drive sizes. As a result, enterprises can easily–and steadily–add new and more efficient hardware while retiring older nodes at the press of a button. This essentially makes Forklift upgrades obsolete. In addition, Swarm's intelligent automation is run by the Health Processor, which continually checks system status, governs and executes all automated procedures including content integrity and executing Lifepoints, administrator-defined policies stored as metadata with the objects.
New capabilities added to version 7.5 include:
- Retire and refresh hardware more efficiently: The latest version of Swarm processes that limit the impact of capacity balancing during hardware maintenance and refreshes without compromising data integrity. As a result, this eliminates potential performance hindrances and saves time when upgrading to new hardware, adding capacity, or retiring failed drives. In addition, a single-step synchronous process now makes data swaps more predictable and efficient. Users can limit operations to specific nodes, providing greater control during hardware maintenance operations.
Customers who regularly erase large amounts of data, such as cloud-based DVR solutions, will find this enhancement beneficial, as it also ensures capacity is reclaimed and rapidly available. Customers performing large data transfers, such as moving old hardware out of a cluster, will also benefit from smarter load balancing. - Handling error conditions: Swarm 7.5 adds sophisticated intelligence in monitoring disk health to give administrators increased insight and displays memory conditions for faster issue resolution. Swarm has always proactively managed drive errors, but the latest version handles read errors differently than it handles write errors. If the disk can no longer write but can still read, it is kept online to ensure optimal use of resources during the recovery process.
- Future-proofing storage: To help future-proof cloud storage solutions, this new version of Swarm adds multipath support to take advantage of dual SATA connections and newer, denser storage arrays for high availability, high performance and seamless migration to web-scale capacities.
Current Caringo customers can find more information about these enhancements with Caringo Connect.
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