SCIENCE

RING Organic Storage handles billions of files and hundreds of thousands of objects per second with the grace and efficiency of an organic system 

Storage system pioneer Scality today announced a new release of its groundbreaking object storage software. Scality RING Organic Storage software, addresses the tremendous need for high performance storage for cloud based applications, such as webmail, photo, video and file sharing, SaaS and other cloud services. The concept of organic storage is detailed in a separate announcement {available http://www.scality.com/storage-software-company-news/ .}

The Performance Myth: SAN and NAS are always faster than object based storage

Object based storage technologies are often perceived as inherently slow. Scality's RING software is the first object storage platform to deliver the performance required for primary storage of web based applications. It can leverage any storage media, from SSD to fast SAS disk to denser and cheaper SATA disks, and it can benefit from the low latency of Infiniband networks or the cost effectiveness of Ethernet. While traditional storage technologies are optimized for very fast serial operations, RING has a completely parallel design, which is ultimately a more effective solution when serving millions of users.

Deployed with SAS disks for primary storage in cloud applications such as webmail or photo sharing website, a small RING of 100 nodes can deliver hundreds of thousands of objects per second, with a predictable latency below 40 ms at a cost of less than $1/GB. When deployed with large SATA disks for long-term storage such as cloud backup, RING's total cost of operation is only a few cents per GB per month. RING Organic Storage proves that object based storage can be faster than SAN or NAS for unstructured data.

"Object-based storage is increasingly adopted by cloud service providers to tackle the large amount of unstructured data," said Pushan Rinnen, Research Director from Gartner. "Those products that offer good performance in addition to low cost and robust data protection will have a better chance of winning in the dynamic cloud computing industry."

Using experience gathered in the field, the essential new features added to Scality RING include:

• A virtually unlimited number of objects, with millions of namespaces per cluster, and tens of billions of files per namespace
• Objects of virtually unlimited size, a 3D HD feature-length movie can be handled as one object
• Mixing servers with different CPU, disk size and type in the same RING, greatly simplifying the technology refresh cycle
• Support for the storage of unstructured content for existing applications with a FUSE connector
• Automatic tiering based on the actual usage patterns of given objects, with effective inline compression
• Additional strategies for snapshots and for synchronous and asynchronous offsite data replication

An advanced management platform providing precise health statistics, enabling software and hardware upgrades without any downtime, including the ability to mark servers for retirement

"People have a tendency to assume that cheaper means you get less. With RING Organic Storage, we demonstrate Christensen's 'disruptive innovation' theory: For unstructured data, the RING is cheaper, and it delivers far more," said Jerome Lecat, CEO of Scality.

A proven solution

Scality RING was first deployed in June 2010 at Telenet, the leading cable operator in Belgium. Telenet chose Scality RING as the primary and long-term storage solution for their webmail platform for over two million users. Their storage requirements have increased fivefold since then, and storage capacity growth has been performed online seamlessly without any downtime whatsoever.

"We chose Scality storage as we knew that the success of our webmail platform was dependant on our ability to offer virtually unlimited storage to our customers. We deployed our new platform with Scality RING in June 2010, and the success exceeded our expectations. The storage has increased five-fold in a year. We went through several software and hardware upgrade without requiring maintenance window or stopping the service, our customer satisfaction has increased, and our cost are contained." said Nick De Jonghe, Manager of Converged Services at Telenet.

RING Organic Storage is the ultimate platform for application level and long-term storage of unstructured objects managed by cloud services. It is a proven solution that delivers a high performance, cost effective, easy-to-manage system that will remain fresh and resilient for decades.

To learn about organic storage, a new class of object storage, please visit: http://www.scality.com/storage-software-company-news/

Follow Scality on Twitter: http: www.twitter.com/scality