Caringo adds support for Microsoft Azure to its Swarm software

Caringo has expanded its Swarm object storage to Microsoft Azure.

The company recently said its object storage software, which already has Amazon S3 support, now is available on the Azure cloud so customers have the ability to move applications seamlessly from Amazon S3 to the Azure cloud by using the Swarm software.

This capability gives customers another storage tier option, allowing them to tier to the Azure cloud without changing mount points or work flows. Files can be consolidated from all filers into a scalable object storage tier that is accessible via a web-based portal for search while also giving the ability to deploy disaster recovery sites globally. Data can be accessed and managed universally through cloud and file protocols and RESTful APIs.

“We’ve talked to a number of customers that don’t want to be connected just to one vendor,” said Tony Barbagallo, Caringo’s vice president of product. “This is an expansion of our platform. We have customers who use our storage on-premise but also want to replicate to the cloud and customers want multiple storage targets.

“They want a hybrid solution so they can distribute cloud storage or replicate to cloud storage,” Barbagallo.

Caringo’s object storage manages objects in a flat address space, making it easy to adjust to petabyte scale configurations. Each object is assigned a unique identifier, which allows a server to retrieve it without needing to know the physical location of the data. These characteristics make it a good fit for cloud storage.

This latest capability gives companies the ability to migrate Amazon S3-based application to the Azure cloud with the use of a RESTful interface.

The new Microsoft Azure template can be deployed in a 16TB, 32TB or 64TB Swarm cluster with an SSL Amazon S3 interface. It requires 18, 26 and 42 available processor cores for 16TB, 32TB and 64TB sizes and each size needs a Jump-Box virtual machine to increase the requirement for each size by one additional processor core.

Once on Swarm, files can be combined and protected in a searchable pool for continued use and complex analysis.

“Azure can offer our operating system as a server running on Azure hardware,” Barbagallo said. “For S3 we have a proxy server. If an application has a S3 problem, it is transferred to our protocol and translated. When the information is sent back, the translation goes the other way.”

In September 2015, Caringo came out with software that lets customers move data back and forth between file-based primary storage and Caringo Swarm object storage software. FileFly for Caringo Swarm is a Windows-based application that plugs directly into the Windows NTFS file system.

FileFly uses policy-based automation to identify and migrate aged data from primary Netapp file servers and arrays running the Windows Storage Server operating system to Caringo Swarm on the back end. No changes are required to applications or end user workflows.

Barbagallo said Caringo has no immediate plans to support the Google Cloud platform.

“Right now, we have no current plans to expand beyond this,” he said.