Caringo Bongo

9:10 AM -- Startup Caringo is attempting to increase the heat on EMC in the content addressable storage (CAS) market, unveiling the latest version of its CAStor software this week. (See Caringo Unveils CAStor 2.0 and Caringo.)

Touting the performance and access speeds of primary disk storage and the ability to grab deeply archived files, Caringo is one of a number of vendors beating the CAS drum. (See Bycast Casts Out, IBM to Build on Bycast, Hitachi Rerolls CAS, and Archiving Gets a Refresh.)

Caringo CEO Mark Goros tells Byte and Switch that CAStor 2.0 boasts new replication features, including the ability to replicate the contents of a CAStor cluster to a remote cluster for disaster recovery purposes. Additionally, Caringo has tweaked the software to provide "substantial" performance increases for reads and writes of small files. (See In Depth: CAS.)

CAS certainly offers benefits to users wrestling with exploding volumes of data, but I feel that, at this stage, the market is still being fleshed out. (See CAS Matures, Confusion Remains.) Caringo, despite claims that its software is 10 times faster than EMC's Centera device, is yet to subject CAStor 2.0 to independent tests, something that will be happening "soon," according to Goros.

EMC has also been busy in this space over the last few weeks, upgrading the capacity of the Centera box. (See EMC Plans Product Blitz and EMC Announces Software.) The vendor's hardware-based CAS message seems to be getting through, and EMC already has an impressive list of customers, including Korea Exchange Bank, Cincinnati Insurance Co., Anna Amalia Library, MidAmerica Bank, and Delta Dental, to name just a few. (See EMC Powers Delta Dental and MidAmerica Takes Back DR.)Clearly, as reported in a recent Byte and Switch Insider, CAS is no longer an experimental offering for early adopters, although some vendors are still circling each other like wary gunslingers.

Increasing competition in this space spells good news for users, particularly when independent testing cuts through all the marketing spiel.

James Rogers, Senior Editor Byte and Switch