ParaScale and Alfresco Software have announced a cloud-based integrated ECM solution co-locating Alfresco Content Management and ParaScale Cloud Storage software on the same hardware. Unlike traditional ECM architectures, the combined solution enables organizations to store and access content without adding management overhead or cost; offers simple configuration and setup; and ensures high-performance and easy scale-out.

Managing content effectively has become an indispensable part of running an efficient business. Content growth requires a sophisticated ECM solution that can scale users and content volumes simply and at low cost without massive up-front capital expenditure. Legacy applications may run in the cloud but modern Content-as-a-Service approaches consuming services resident in the same cloud are required to inherit the benefits of a Cloud Service Architecture. Only then can users achieve on-demand scalability, fault tolerance, cloud-wide network security and cost efficiency.

“Integrating the Alfresco ECM solution with the ParaScale cloud storage platform significantly improves manageability and performance for ECM users, while lowering costs both by eliminating a layer of servers to run Alfresco as well by allowing the usage of commodity priced storage,” said Sajai Krishnan, CEO, ParaScale. “ParaScale’s storage nodes are standard Linux servers and it took zero effort for Alfresco to bring up their application directly on ParaScale’s storage servers. Alfresco and Vembu are early ParaScale partners in an ecosystem we intend to develop to reduce the total solution costs of storage intensive applications by running qualified applications directly, affordably and scalably on our storage servers.”

“Alfresco’s Content-as-a-Service platform is designed to take full advantage of a Cloud Service Architecture and the ParaScale platform which enables any node in the cloud to serve requests for data,” said John Powell, CEO, Alfresco Software. “This gives enterprises the ability to simply and rapidly setup cloud-based content management by running one instance of Alfresco software per node within the cloud and to scale-out and grow their ECM solution in both performance and capacity.”

The ParaScale cloud also supports policy based replication to ensure high availability for content access. Users can set policies to configure the number of copies of a document that are replicated within the cloud. When a new document is created, the ParaScale software propagates the new version within the cloud to another storage node based on the policy. This makes the Alfresco ECM solution extremely reliable by ensuring users can still access documents from an available copy if parts of the cloud are unavailable.

Details of the combined solution are available in a white paper located here: http://www.parascale.com/index.php/content-management-using-cloud-storage