M+E Connections

Caringo started shipping its latest line of Swarm Server Appliances and also launched version 11.1 of Caringo Swarm Object Storage Software.

“This is the third iteration to our appliance line,” Adrian Herrera, Caringo VP of marketing, told the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) in a briefing just ahead of the April 23 announcement.

Caringo is targeting customers who “do not want to send content into the cloud” and it is also an “alternative for organizations that want” an on-prem service, “but they don’t want to sign up for a very large on-premise deployment like other object store solutions,” he said.

The turnkey solution for on-prem private cloud storage that Swarm Server Appliances provides offers four key advantages: Rapid, flexible deployment; it optimizes durability/footprint; it’s feature-rich for end users; and it’s hassle-free for administrators, he said.

“What we ended up with was a solution,” with Swarm Server Appliances, that “starts at 32 percent lower [in] cost versus other on-prem object storage alternatives,” he said.

The on-prem private cloud storage solution starts at 168 TBs in a Single Server Appliance and scales to 100s of PBs in multi-server configurations, the company said. This latest addition to the Caringo product line enables customers to reduce costs while supporting the growing demand for instantly accessible data and content for collaboration, streaming and monetization., it said.

Deployment is flexible and fast and organizations can expand in only a matter of minutes and easily scale to 100s of PBs with integrated backup to any Amazon S3-enabled device or service for seamless disaster recovery and cold archiving, Caringo noted.

What that means is “content-driven organizations can now optimize their on-prem resources and benefit from the distributed protection of the cloud while ensuring their content is instantly accessible for continued use and monetization,” it said.

“Digital content and how it is consumed has dramatically changed over the past few years, forcing organizations to quickly modernize their storage infrastructure,” according to Caringo CEO Tony Barbagallo. “With our new line of Swarm Server Appliances, we can help customers quickly find a solution that fits their data center footprint, cost and performance requirements—so they can deliver instant access to archives, enabling remote workflows and streaming services,” he said in the announcement.

“We recently deployed the new Swarm Servers for a professional sports team, and they were up and running in a matter of hours,” according to Liz Davis, VP of the Media Workflow Group at IT and services firm Diversified. “They went with Swarm Servers instead of tape to ensure they had immediate access to their videos for production and to enable streaming services in the future,” she said in a statement, adding her firm recommended Caringo “due to the ease of deployment, excellent value and feature set.”

It’s a Major League Baseball team that is among the new customers using Caringo’s appliances, Herrera told MESA, but said he couldn’t identify the team. Media and entertainment companies that are using Caringo’s software, meanwhile, include Disney Streaming Services, he said, noting that company “expanded their footprint recently, which is very good for us.”

“We also enhanced our software,” with version 11.1 of Caringo Swarm Object Storage Software, Herrera said.

Those enhancements include Amazon S3 protocol compatibility and performance, as well as email and Slack alerting.

The new update facilitates scaling for large clusters of over 1,000 nodes and integrates the Elasticsearch version 6 search engine, while delivering other valuable features to end users, including built-in data management and secure file sharing, Caringo said. 

Caringo also “enhanced our Proactive Alerting for Remote Administration,” Herrera told MESA. “This is really becoming important these days,” he said, noting: “What we’re hearing from the channel right now and those who specialize in media is there’s a lot of organizations right now who are struggling with accessing content. They’re struggling with setting up their workforce for remote workflows.” So, Caringo is providing a solution that makes organizations’ content remotely accessible, he said.