Is “cloud storage” where storage is heading? Annette Saliken, director of marketing communications for Bycast, is confident that it is. For almost seven years, Bycast has been providing its GRID “business model,” as Saliken put it, but only now are storage experts really starting to talk about it, she said.
The company’s GRID solution (what they call storage virtualization software) is a software middle layer between the storage infrastructure and the end user. Through partnerships with about five other companies, this new “business model,” as Saliken put it, interfaces with various third-party systems throughout the production workflow and provides for user-defined rules for movement of content.
According to Saliken, what’s really getting broadcasters excited about this solution for user-configurable public and private access, the multisite access in heterogeneous storage environments and the elimination of back ups. Instead of backing up content, the system automatically produces replicas of the content, and the user can set how many replicas are made.
Bycast was specifically showing its newest StorageGRID 8 solution at the show, featuring a new, high-performance cache. The company is also offering “Express Bundles,” which provide for an almost unlimited-scale implementation of the GRID solution.
If Bycast has been doing this for years and the storage industry is just now noticing, it seems like other storage companies have a lot of catching up to do.