Content-addressed storage (CAS) pioneer Paul Carpentier, along with partners Jonathan Ring and Mark Goros, have launched Caringo Inc., a new company dedicated to providing scalable, high-end fixed content storage software, while reducing complexity, vendor lock-in and mounting costs. The company’s flagship product is CAStor, which is designed as a change to the traditional approach to CAS because it introduces third-generation technology that should provide advantages over more primitive CAS products still employed today. These advantages include:

• It is hardware agnostic; 
• The scalable parallel cluster architecture   accommodates data growth as needed – even across heterogeneous, evolving  hardware; 
• The long-term storage is designed to be impervious to  attack; 
• It is self-configuring, managing and  healing; 
• The system provides a standard HTTP interface free  from proprietary APIs and allows access from any platform, from cell phone to  mainframe; 
• Includes built-in disaster recovery, backup and  continuous data availability features in a single, integrated software  package; and 
• Architected to prevent bottlenecks, eliminating any  single point of failure

CAStor is sold on a bootable USB flash drive that plugs into the user’s choice of X86 hardware with a Gigabyte (GB) or more of RAM, one or more hard drives and GB Ethernet. Scalability is achieved as simply as booting another node at any point in time.

CAStor’s also provides a Zero File System, 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, the company said.

Carpentier serves as Caringo CTO, Ring as president and Goros as CEO.