ParaScale launched its cloud storage product this week intended to address the content and archival storage markets. The company will allow private enterprises to build cloud storage within the firewall for archival or streaming media or public clouds for service providers, which would compete with Amazon S3 and Nirvanix, among others.

Its product, ParaScale Cloud Storage, is clustered and distributed storage software based on x86-based commodity computers running Linux.

ParaScale Cloud Storage is an asymmetric clustering product that allows scaling of performance independent of capacity. It features load sharing, capacity balancing, thin provisioning and replication across the cluster. Nodes are automatically discovered as they are added to the cluster and self-healing occurs if nodes fail. Files are moved between nodes to address utilization inefficiencies and nodes with different amounts of storage or different size disk drives can be used. It supports both Microsoft’s Common Internet File System (CIFS) and the Unix/Linux Network File System (NFS).

Unlike NetApp’s GX, Isilon and BlueArc, the product does not require dedicated hardware.

Founded in July 2004 by CTO Cameron Bahar, formerly of Scale8, and Rasoul Oskouy, formerly of Juniper Networks, the company is funded for $11.37 million by Menlo Ventures and Charles River Ventures.

Pricing for ParaScale software is based on the physical capacity of the cloud. A trial version of the software is available for download.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW.