SCIENCE

Object-based approach to storage delivers application level performance and evolves like a living organism with absolutely no manual intervention

After securing $7 M in a funding round earlier this year, Scality today unveiled the concept of organic storage, a new class of object-based storage that remains fresh and resilient for decades. In a companion release, Scality announced a new version of its RING Organic Storage software, the first object storage system to deliver application level and long-term storage for unstructured content managed by cloud services, such as webmail, photo, video and file sharing, SaaS and cloud storage providers (StaaS).

Why is it called ORGANIC storage?

Organic storage demonstrates many of the features of a living organism: The storage is spread among a collection of nodes (like cells), each made of generic x86 servers with direct attached storage. These nodes share a highly parallel distributed intelligence which does not depend on any single component. As a result the system is resilient, self-healing, adaptive, location aware and constantly renewing.

The downside of traditional storage for unstructured data

The storage of unstructured data doubles every 18 months, and the growth is even higher for cloud service providers. Deployment of SAN and NAS storage technologies - or even clustered systems - presents significant issues when used for unstructured data.

"Our research indicates that cloud service providers and large content depots plan to expand their storage capacity by over 76% a year for the next five years. One of their biggest challenges is to quickly take advantage of the fastest, largest, and lowest cost storage technologies while avoiding the high costs and unwanted downtime associated with upgrading or replacing legacy storage systems," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage and IT executive strategies at IDC. "Solutions like Scality's organic storage and RING storage software will make it possible for organizations with large and fast growing rich content and unstructured data pools to adopt a lower cost and non-disruptive approach to deploying and expanding their storage assets."

Even with server virtualization, cloud service providers face huge challenges, including mounting volumes of data for specific application servers and inherent i-node limitations that restrict the number of files. The biggest issue with SAN and NAS technologies is the need to replace the whole system and migrate all of the data every four to five years in order to benefit from the ongoing reduction in the cost of hardware. These compounding issues result in a system that is complex to manage, unavailable during scheduled maintenance, and ultimately very costly.

Jérôme Lecat, CEO of Scality, said, "Unstructured data is the life blood of cloud service providers such as email service providers, software-as-a-service providers and storage-as-a-service providers. With RING Organic Storage, Scality delivers the four must-haves for these complex storage environments: virtually unlimited scalability, absolute reliability, exceptional performance and reduced infrastructure costs."

An organic storage system is always young

Just as a living organism is made of cells that constantly and automatically replenish themselves, without harming or impairing the system, RING Organic Storage is made of nodes in a configuration that can be modified with evolving storage requirements. This allows new servers to be added while the application remains fully functional. When a server dies, absolutely no manual intervention is required.

The intelligence of RING Organic Storage resides not in the components, but in the RING software that links the components together. As a result the RING can transform over time: older servers are marked for retirement and taken out of the system. In this way the RING of nodes is always able to leverage the newest, lowest cost hardware. It does this with absolutely no specific deployment or manual migration processes. The results include fewer opportunities for human error, eliminated risk of data loss during migrations, and massively lower operating and infrastructure costs. In addition, RING Organic Storage uses standard hardware components so that it benefits from price competition on generic servers, disks and networking equipment.

To read about the new features in the latest version of Scality's organic storage software, please visit:http://www.scality.com/storage-software-company-news/

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