It’s Cloud Connect week – which means that every Cloud vendor under the sun is launching new products or services. Not wanting to be left out, Appistry today announced the availability for beta testing of Appistry CloudIQ Storage. CloudIQ Storage is a play for data intensive applications in the cloud - beta clients are running highly sensitive, big data applications for government security and intelligence, using a combination of private and hybrid cloud setups.

CloudIQ Storage may be used as a stand-alone cloud storage system or in conjunction with Appistry CloudIQ Engine to enable what Appistry is calling Computational Storage. Computational storage unifies applications and data by storing data across commodity servers and intelligently locating application processing on the machines containing the relevant data. As a result, computational storage allows for the delivery of data-intensive applications more cheaply than otherwise.

Some relevant details:

• Special CloudIQ Storage “editions” will address the unique storage requirements of particular communities.
• The first of these, Hadoop Edition, offers plug-and-play compatibility with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), part of the popular Apache Hadoop open source framework.
• The HDFS architecture is built around a single metadata repository, called the NameNode. Because the NameNode is not easily clustered, it represents a single point of failure and a bottleneck for the entire system. CloudIQ Storage has no single point of failure and no centralized bottleneck, making it more suitable for mission-critical deployment.
• Appistry CloudIQ Storage Hadoop Edition ships with HDFS drivers, enabling it to be easily deployed in place of HDFS for applications where reliability and throughput are key considerations.

It’s an interesting play that brings file-based storage down a few notches in the cost rankings while overcoming data access issues by co-locating processing and data storage. Finally it brings a smart approach to application workloads, moving them closer to the data on which they work. CEO of Appistry, Kevin Haar talks it up saying:

Storage is an integral component of today's data-centric applications. It’s no surprise then that traditional approaches to storage are often to blame for the high cost and inferior performance of many a mission-critical application… With Appistry CloudIQ Storage, we are able to unify application processing and storage requirements to the cloud to dramatically reduce total costs and improve overall performance.