Canadian Cloud Launched by Cartika Built on ZFS Storage Platform

Andrew Rouchotas, Cartika CEO recently stated "Our Cloud storage backbone differentiates us from all other Cloud providers available in Canada or the United States. We felt that building a solution on open standards and Open Source technology was the appropriate path to take. ZFS is simply the most powerful and resilient file system available and is the appropriate backbone for Cloud Computing platforms."

ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include data integrity verification against data corruption, support for near limitless storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. ZFS is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The ZFS name is a trademark of Oracle.

Cartika has developed a Cloud storage platform to operate within the Oracle Open Standards and Open Source ZFS filesystems and logical volume managers. Using this technology, Cartika is able to deliver highly flexible and available storage systems which are resilient to corruption by perpetually self healing itself. Data is replicated automatically both onsite and offsite between its Canadian and US datacenters for the purposes of disaster recovery. Those wishing to opt out of cross border replication are able to do so.

Cartika has introduced several new concepts and key features to Cloud Computing and storage platforms:

• Automatic replication not only locally, but, also offsite which is expected to be a stepping stone towards a fluid Cloud solution spanning multiple data centers.
• The use of Commodity hardware for their Cloud storage backbone where data can be seamlessly replicated and activated on different hardware
• Auto and continuous self healing of all data to ensure data integrity in all replicated copies of the data
• Read and write SSD caching removing bottlenecks typically seen in SAN solutions and ultimately delivers SSD performance rates for all reads and writes regardless of what drives and drive speeds are found behind the cache
• Using ZFS replication, Cartika is able to deliver a local storage based Private Clouds where Virtual Cloud instances are replicated across pools of local commodity types of servers