CAStor in Managed Services

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The managed services market has matured, driven primarily by the need for reliable remote backup and archiving. Successful Managed Service Providers (MSP) are now focused on driving down operating costs by creating and adding efficiencies throughout their infrastructure, while keeping customer service and reliability at peak levels.

In the current environment, managed service providers must deliver more integrated and innovative services to differentiate themselves from the competition. Success is measured in the ability to attract new customers, lengthen and widen existing contracts and reduce customer turnover.

There are a number of questions that must be asked in order to deliver a successful new managed service. They are as follows:

Capital Outlay:

If you build it, they may not come. Do you have the luxury to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to build an infrastructure on the hope of closing customers?
Will your initial investment produce immediate returns?

Provisioning:

Profits are measured not only in hard costs, but soft costs as well.
Can you afford to take on additional headcount or put staff through extensive training?

Pricing:

Is the service a true value-add service to the end user and is it competitively priced?
What margins can you expect and how soon can you turn a profit?

Selling:

Can this solution be marketed to many audiences

Can new markets be created?

Teaming with Caringo is the answer to success

According to leading analysts, more than 80% of the information stored this year will be unstructured, content. This new and massive amount of content must be stored according to company policies as well as new federal regulations. It's a new problem and the companies that jump on this opportunity first will have the first to market competitive advantage.

Caringo's CAStor solution is ideal for Managed Service Provider companies that are ready to take advantage of this tremendous market opportunity for archive services. CAStor is a hardware-agnostic software solution that is designed to be provisioned as an effective and fast archive solution for the service provider market.

CAStor drives down the cost of managing archiving and provides profit for you even while you offer your customers breakthrough pricing.
Offers additional revenue potential as a unique product offering.
Streamlines auto provisioning.
Scales without downtime, data migration or limits.
Configures, manages and heals itself.

With CAStor you can start small and build your infrastructure as your deal flow closes. There is virtually no wasted resource at all. There is no need to pre-buy and provision storage you may not need until later. Scaling a CAStor Cluster is as easy as adding a 1 Terabyte node of commodity hardware while the system is up and running.

CAStor has built-in attributes that allow service providers to bypass problems that arise from offering a new managed service, which revolve around capital outlay, pricing, positioning and selling. The solution allows Managed Service Providers to offer reasonable monthly fees to customers while retaining solid margins. The branded disk-to-disk solution increases "stickiness" of existing contracts, attracts new business and reduces potential customer turnover.

Low Capital Investment

CAStor eliminates upfront costs such as expensive tape media, tape-based hardware and proprietary storage hardware that have large service contracts tied to them. CAStor provides a number of unique and cost effective advantages. It runs on commodity hardware and is massively scalable. This means you can begin with a small cluster - say 2 or 3 Terabytes - for a very small price. As your storage needs grow, you can add nodes to the cluster on the fly. There are essentially no limits to CAStor scalability. Keep adding nodes and your performance and storage keeps getting better and bigger. As commodity hardware gets faster and better, you can literally upgrade the hardware in your cluster just by bringing up new nodes with more modern hardware. This seamless upgradeability in itself is a great cost and time saver.

Lower Management Costs

CAStor automatically configures itself so there is no Sys admin work to worry about. No technical or service call required. In this same manner, you can remove older hardware from the system. Simply 'retire' an older node, that node disperses its content across the other nodes and when it is done, shreds the contents of its disks so you can safely re-deploy or dispose of it. CAStor also heals itself when a disk goes bad. The recovery can be significantly faster than RAID (depending on the size of the cluster) and your data remains available during recovery. In fact, you can even leave the bad disk in the node until it is convenient to replace it. We call this 'weed at your leisure.' It's another time and repair call savings unique to CAStor.

Market Need	CAStor
Hardware Agnostic	CAStor runs on the commodity hardware of your choice. As new hardware becomes available, just plug it into your CAStor cluster. Over time, you can remove the older technology if you wish or just let it continue to work for you. CAStor organically optimizes utilization of nodes in the cluster so it will make the best use of all hardware available.
Massively Scalable	A system to store content does you no good if it doesn't scale as your business grows. Scale to as many nodes as you need seamlessly without unloading and reloading data. Information integrity can be provably guaranteed, over the short, medium or even very long term.
Multi-Platform Support	CAStor File System Gateway provides legacy applications with instant access to CAStor through familiar CIFS and NFS network protocols. Simply mount a file share, set your policy constraints and point your application to the share. The result is freedom from vendor-proprietary hardware and a lower total cost of ownership
Easy Interface	Applications interface to CAStor using industry standard HTTP 1.1. No API's. No porting. Quick development and the ability to utilize existing HTTP client libraries in use throughout the industry.
Self Configuring	Plug a Caringo USB key into a computer, and the key will load all operating system and application software needed to turn the system into a CAStor node. Add another machine and it automatically configures itself, joins the network and activities of the other CAStor nodes in the cluster.
Self Managing Self Healing	A CAStor cluster manages itself. That is, processes running in real time organically balance the storage and CPU loads and check object replicas to be sure they match the policy set for that object. Should a stray cosmic ray flip a bit somewhere, the system automatically recovers. If a disk goes down, all other disks on all other nodes participate to recover any data that was on the bad disk. The larger the cluster, the faster the recovery time.
Meet Regulatory Compliance	Base CAStor provides all the reliability and data integrity you need for all but the most stringently compliance based government applications. Caringo has invented a breakthrough process (patent pending) for transparent and uncompromising field upgrading of the hashing algorithm used in CAS, effectively scaling the strength against readily available computer power. The result is that your hash never will go stale. Caringo's optional Content Integrity Seal provides the first industry example of guaranteed data integrity that can literally last the lifetime of your information.

CAStor is the foundation that supplies the scalable, hardware agnostic, high performance, guaranteed integrity, content storage software that will allow Managed Service Providers able to significantly lower their management costs.

Customers no longer need to rely on systems that have been pieced together. Your staff will spend far less time fielding calls from customers running unsupported software or handling requests for switching tapes, setting retentions or requesting restores.

CAStor stores, retrieves and protects all your reference information on a fast-access, scalable single tier of storage. It's better and less expensive than tape, it's totally reliable and ensures the integrity of stored information for true long term content storage. CAStor provides primary storage for content with the speed of primary storage and the integrity of an archive. It's simple, it's dramatically less expensive and it works.

Today you can offer your customers the ability to offload real time storage of their content. A simple drag and drop operation or your team can quickly build an automated system for your customers that will relieve them of the responsibility of archiving their massive content storage requirements. You can offer guaranteed integrity, real time availability, and regulatory compliance and save your customer the expense and hassle of buying massive amounts of hardware and software to manage this problem in-house.

The best news? You can try CAStor for a very small investment to satisfy yourself and your management that there is a massive market need for remote archiving services. Once you're satisfied, simply continue to add customers and storage. Email mspinfo@caringo.com for more information on CAStor for Managed Service Providers.

Download .pdf CAStor for Managed Services