Appistry Brings Storage Into Cloud Platform

The launch of Appistry CloudIQ Storage gives VARs and systems integrators a scalable, fault-tolerant and affordable storage option that can be used as a stand-alone or in conjunction with Appistry's CloudIQ Engine to enable Computation Storage, which unifies applications and data by storing data across commodity servers and migrating application processing to the machines that contain the relevant data.

"A storage offering is a great solution around which to build a cloud practice if [a solution provider] hasn't already done so," said Sam Charrington, Appistry's vice president of product management and marketing, in an interview. "There's a huge opportunity for systems integrators to jump in and get enterprises ready for cloud computing. They can get started with the storage element and move into cloud management and cloud applications."

CloudIQ Storage gives Appistry an edge over its cloud platform competition, adding the ability to deliver storage to both private and hybrid clouds. CloudIQ Storage is built for petabyte scale, features a fully-distributed architecture with no single point of failure and can service Web-scale data sets and loads by distributing files across multiple machines. It also allows servers to be used for computation purposes as well as for file storage, as opposed to traditional methods that rely on the transfer of data files over bandwidth-constrained interconnects.

Overall, Appistry said, the addition of CloudIQ Storage to its platform roster introduces a low-cost, reliable and geographically aware cloud storage option for cloud computing.

"Storage is an integral component of today's data-centric applications. It's no surprise then that traditional approaches to storage are often to blame for the high cost and inferior performance of many a mission-critical application," said Kevin Haar, Appistry's CEO, in a statement. "With Appistry CloudIQ Storage, we are able to unify application processing and storage requirements to the cloud to dramatically reduce total costs and improve overall performance. This is a natural extension of the Appistry CloudIQ Platform and another step towards the realization of our vision for next-generation PaaS for the enterprise."

Appistry is launching CloudIQ Storage as the market for cloud-based storage grows. According to research conducted by Gartner at its 2009 Data Center conference, roughly one-third of attendees planed to implement private storage clouds within the next 12 months, meaning solution providers have increasing opportunities to use cloud storage as an inroad to broader cloud computing offerings while also reducing the costs and boosting the performance of cloud applications.

"The cost of storage played a dominant role in the cost of applications," Charrington said. "And the connection between applications and storage has affected application performance. We're talking a cloud approach to storage to change the cost and reliability of applications in the cloud."

Charrington added that with the launch of CloudIQ Storage, Appistry is sticking to its application-centric roots and not looking to rival storage incumbents like EMC and NetApp.

"We're really trying to leverage our strength as an application platform company," he said. "This fills a substantial, but pretty well-defined niche. The channel providers -- the systems integrators -- they already have storage partners. We're looking for them to offer this alongside the established names like EMC and NetApp as cloud storage offerings and serve a broader footprint to create more cloud opportunities."

Along with launching CloudIQ Storage, Appistry on Monday also unveiled the CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition, a special edition that offers plug-and-play compatibility with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Apache's Hadoop is a widely used open-source project for processing and analyzing large amounts of data. The project provides MapReduce, a software framework for distributed processing of large data sets and HDFS, a distributed file system that supports MapReduce. Appistry's Hadoop edition ships with HDFS drivers which can be deployed in place of HDFS to boost scalability, reliability and throughput of HDFS-based applications.

Because HDFS architecture is built around a single metadata repository, it is not clusterable and represents a single point of failure. The addition of CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition eliminates that single point of failure and centralized bottlenecks in HDFS systems.