Content-addressed storage pioneer Paul Carpentier has started a new storage company called Caringo Inc. The company is positioned as providing, “scalable, high-end fixed content storage software, while reducing complexity, vendor lock-in and mounting costs.” Sounds like just the ticket for hospital enterprise storage (you know, like PACS and CVIS). Their new product is called CAStore (can you say that without snickering? I can't). Here's their pitch:

• It is hardware agnostic;
• The scalable parallel
  cluster architecture accommodates data growth as needed – even across
  heterogeneous, evolving hardware;
• The long-term storage is designed to be impervious to attack;
• It is self-configuring, managing and healing;
• The
  system provides a standard HTTP interface free from proprietary APIs
  and allows access from any platform, from cell phone to mainframe;
• Includes
  built-in disaster recovery, backup and continuous data availability
  features in a single, integrated software package; and
• Architected to prevent bottlenecks, eliminating any single point of failure.

Sounds like motherhood and apple pie. What's really cool is that CAStor is sold on a bootable USB flash drive that plugs into the user’s
choice of X86 hardware with a Gigabyte (GB) or more of RAM, one or more
hard drives and GB Ethernet. Scalability is achieved as simply as
booting another node at any point in time. Imagine selling a USB drive for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars - it boggles the mind.

You can read an “RFP” for CAS systems here. I hoped to fine a photo of the Caringo USB drive to go with this post - I couldn't, so instead you can see fancy RAID drives at right.