Scality is 4 year old company delivering new ways of serving up storage via object storage technology. The company founders have a shared past and developed the Scality IP called RING which is based on the ability to scale out significantly across many self-managing nodes.
Object storage is concept which has taken off recently where storage is not relying on a traditional file system, but rather the addressing of the content is run from inside the object storage clustered arrays. It refers to object because the different implementations will represent files back to the host in their original form, but files could be anything and are broken down into objects.
Scality RING is based on nodes of commodity server hardware and storage which can span SSD and SAS/SATA. Nodes can be organised in tiers and the nodes can reside in different locations. Functions such as protection by replication or erasure-code are built-in and at the core of the system. RING also maintains self-healing functions across the nodes. The access from host systems is provided by standard protocols such as HTTP REST and a Scale-Out File system via Fuse is also available.
The customer cases referenced by Scality highlights aggregators doing email, storage, SaaS, cloud hosting, social media etc. In this piece we looked at how aggregators will serve many of the new cloud services, and also how they will define best practice. These types of customers typically deploy large scale IT and are demanding about assessing the utility and cost of their infrastructure. We discussed the general point of object storage solutions and that the industry fortunately rally around using the same term. By initially concentrating on the service providers the company has concentrated on a niche although the solution has a wider appeal. But it may be a wise strategy to demonstrate early on that it can satisfy the needs of super-users.
Picture credit: Martin Hingley