MIT spin-out Permabit Technology Corporation has launched what it calls value tier storage for cloud service providers.

It's supposed to address the three concerns customers raise about cloud storage: scalability, availability and security.

The widgetry, reportedly available on a flexible pricing model that requires minimal upfront capital, is built on the company's massively scalable, continuously available storage that includes advanced Dedupe 2.0 data reduction and protection technologies.

Permabit says its Cloud Storage is designed to address the specific needs of service providers and fit seamlessly into their application hosting infrastructure, delivering the high availability necessary for them to meet aggressive Service Level Agreements, while its grid architecture will let them seamlessly expand and upgrade storage as needed from terabytes to petabytes.

The patented solution touts increased high performance, achieving 280% faster performance with two high-end Xeon Quad Cores. It's also got enhanced security features using built-in AES encryption and WORM capabilities that can translate into compliance-oriented storage and additional fee opportunities.

The cloud solution's base configurations run up to 144TB of raw disk capacity.

The company says the system automatically and transparently adapts as storage nodes are added, redistributing data across the storage grid as the system expands. Up to 32 grids (4.6PB of total raw capacity) can be managed from a central web console.

Built-in inline next-generation data deduplication (Dedupe 2.0) and compression reportedly improves its effective storage capacity, providing further cost benefits for both providers and clients.

The Permabit grid architecture allows for hot upgrades, which means continuous availability.

There's built-in data protection complements of some patented RAIN-EC technology so if the system ever experiences simultaneous failures on separate nodes, unprotected data is automatically recovered before restoring full data redundancy, resulting in up to a four times increase in long-term data safety.

This Intelligent Recovery technology is supposed to offer up to 1,000 times more reliability than industry standard RAID 6.

The fully redundant architecture is coupled with built-in replication for automated off-site disaster recovery.