Enterprise Cloud Computing Track at Cloud Expo

There and you thought that Appistry was just serving applications up into the cloud for U.S. intelligence agencies, FedEx and State Street Bank.

Well, it is but now it's gone and diversified into cloud storage - huge, massively scalable, petabyte-heavy, Hadoop-sized cloud storage for what's generally called BIG data these days - storage with no single point of failure or bottlenecks, it says, created through commodity servers, networking and Appistry's REST-based distributed virtual file storage system.

The start-up is taking on traditional storage, folks like EMC and NetApp, and conventions like SANs and NAS, where the thin little traffic lanes create a performance bottleneck for applications that have to process lots of data.

The widgetry, in beta until early next quarter, can be used standalone or paired with the company's existing CloudIQ Engine.

The two together can turn into so-called computational storage, which wastes no machine's compute cycles and moves applications snug up to the data. All of the servers in a CloudIQ Storage system are multi-tasking and can store and serve files and distribute work across many machines, doing the processing on the widgets with the right data.

That way it's supposed to be able to knock the performance of data-intensive applications out of the park at commodity prices.

Users can incrementally scale simply by adding more servers and storage. Appistry says there's no downtime doing that. And a single instance of a CloudIQ Storage system can reportedly span multiple data centers, mirroring files across all the cloud storage servers in case a data center goes down.

Besides a Community Edition with five free terabytes, Appistry will also have a Hadoop Edition that replaces the Haddop Distributed File System (HDFS), making the popular widgetry more scalable and reliable, and MapReduce applications, in turn, more mission-critical.

Appistry explains that the native HDFS architecture is built around a single metadata repository called the NameNode and because the NameNode isn't easily clustered, it represents a single point of failure and a bottleneck for the entire system. CloudIQ Storage fixes that limitation.

The company also anticipates having a Provider Edition for managed service providers (MSPs).

A subscription should run $249 a TB a year, according to Appistry VP of product strategy Sam Charrington, based on what the customer actually uses.