Cloud storage boosts data delivery

The upgrade to faster broadband networks would result in speedier data delivery for households as well as businesses, reports BusinessWeek.

Streaming HD video may be clogging up the last mile in homes, but in an enterprise setting it's not Vin Diesel flicks that are the problem, it's larger and more important data being stored in the cloud.

Medical records containing radiographic scans or genomic data for cancer research are transferred from corporate offices and university connections over the long-haul network. These records can consist of terabytes of data that need to travel to cloud storage vendors.

ParaScale, a developer of software designed to give customers scalable on-site and cloud backup and recovery, has unveiled its new ParaScale Cloud Storage software, according to ChannelWeb.

The software allows hundreds of commodity Linux-based servers to be clustered together to form a massive file repository, says Sajai Krishnan, president of the California-based storage vendor.

With the ParaScale Cloud Storage software, customers can make a mass of commodity servers look like a single storage box for use as an internal or an external storage cloud, Krishnan says.

Needing to better deal with 50 billion files worth of photos, engineers at Facebook are installing a new photo storage system they say is 50% faster than traditional systems, reports Computerworld.

The storage system, dubbed Haystack, has been under development in-house for the past couple of years, and Facebook has been rolling it out in limited test versions to parts of the network for the past few months.

The company expects to use Haystack to store all Facebook photos by next week, according to Bobby Johnson, director of engineering at Facebook.