Parascale

About Parascale

Parascale, founded in 2004 by Cameron Bahar and Rasoul Oskouy, developed a cloud storage software platform. The company was established in Cupertino, California, and operated in the cloud computing and data management sector. Parascale's core product was a software solution that aggregated multiple standard Linux servers to function as a single, highly scalable virtual file-storage appliance. This allowed for the creation of massive file repositories with parallel throughput, enabling deployments to start at several terabytes and easily scale by adding more commodity hardware.

The platform was designed for data-intensive applications such as video-on-demand, document archiving, online backup, and video surveillance. It provided access through various file protocols including CIFS, NFS, HTTP, FTP, and WebDAV, presenting a more cost-effective alternative to traditional storage area networks (SAN) or clustered network-attached storage (NAS) systems. The system was engineered to be self-healing to minimize administration, allowing a single administrator to manage hundreds of nodes and terabytes of data.

In May 2008, Parascale secured $11.4 million in a Series A funding round from institutional investors CRV and Menlo Ventures. Despite initial interest from both enterprise and service provider clients, the company faced financial challenges and was unable to secure a Series B funding round. This led to a downsizing of the team to reduce its burn rate. In August 2010, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), now part of Hitachi Vantara, acquired Parascale's intellectual property and its core engineering team. This acquisition was a strategic move for HDS to integrate Parascale's technology into its own suite of IT offerings.