ParaScale, a startup based in Cupertino, California, announced the trial availability of its cloud storage system. As more and more people know, cloud storage refers to the fact that data is no longer kept on physical devices, but on the Internet.

The company advertises the high security of its storage method, as central metadata control servers are the only ones to have full access to the nodes in the network. In other words, human interfering within the network will be virtually impossible. Also, operations can be made within the network without the need of peer confirmation. The cloud can be permanently upgraded, according to clients' needs.

“The trial will demonstrate for customers how ParaScale software can be used to cobble together standard servers from multiple vendors, including older servers that are ready to be decommissioned, into a self-managing cloud, adding capacity and removing nodes on the fly,” said Cameron Bahar, CTO and co-founder of ParaScale. “For the first time, end-users and service providers can download software off the web, and have a scale-out NAS solution ready to store data in under an hour.”

According to TechCrunch, the beta trial of ParaScale's product will only be available for a limited number of clients, some of them picked from the initial testers of the product in the early development stages. The price of the cloud storage service will reach approximately $1 per gigabyte, with no additional costs for inbound and outbound bandwidth, which, on a long term, makes it more convenient compared to its competitors. The data can be loaded on all Linux servers and on the Windows servers that have been virtualized with specific products.

“Next-gen NAS [Network-Attached Storage] solutions, like the one from ParaScale, will appeal to enterprise users looking to deploy economical private cloud deployments within their own firewall and managed by their own people. Such clustered NAS technologies will also enable service providers to deploy public clouds, without having to develop the technology on their own, as interest in storage as a service picks up,” said Noemi Greyzdorf, storage analyst, IDC.