SCIENCE

Scality has announced plans to open-source the Software Development Kit (SDK) of its patented RING technology. As a kickoff incentive, Scality is offering contributing developers bounties from a $100,000 USD fund.

The Scality Open Source Program (SCOP) will be introduced in a presentation today at the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Software Developers Conference in Santa Clara, California entitled “Facilitating the Open Source Community Transition to Cloud Storage” by Giorgio Regni, CTO of Scality, and Bradley King, Director of Customer Architectures.   

In the context of SCOP, Scality is publishing an open-source library called Scality Droplet, which makes code immediately available for download. Scality Droplet will enable developers to easily build applications which interface with Scality RING, with Amazon’s S3 API and more generally with any object storage technology, thanks to Scality RING’s modular design. Scality RING is ideal for applications handling enormous volumes of user-generated content such as email in the cloud or social applications, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The Scality Droplet library implements common services such as encryption, compression and large file slicing to let application developers focus on their users’ needs.

The contest or grant opportunity is called the “SCOP Bounty Program,” and it will enable talented developers to apply for $1,000 to $10,000 bounties from a pot of $100,000. To be eligible, the developer’s software application must be built using code freely available from the Scality Droplet library. Interested developers can visit http://scop.scality.com for more information or to download an application form. The submission deadline is November 30, 2010.

“Our vision with SCOP is to make it as easy as possible to develop applications accessing the quality and the robustness of the object-based storage approach,” said Giorgio Regni, CTO of Scality. “The SCOP program is win-win for all: it allows the industry to benefit from the richness of the developers’ applications while ensuring quality in storage performance and scalability. SCOP will benefit from the contributions of the developer community, and developers will get rewarded for their efforts. Scality RING, which offers a Cloud storage backend that can easily handle mission-critical and carrier-grade applications, will benefit from more applications developed with object storage approach.”

Scality RING offers the high performance of a SAN with the low cost and unlimited scalability of the cloud – an industry first. With RING, Scality guarantees storage costs are 50% cheaper than what you can get with other SAN- or NAS-based vendors in the same magnitude of performance and reliability. Any application that can talk to Amazon’s S3 API can be deployed with Scality RING. Since its launch, Scality RING has received a warm welcome from large mail service providers and online hosted service providers in the US and Europe.

“The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) industry momentum and membership continues to accelerate with the release of its Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) standard, ongoing interoperability programs, and  technical education for data storage as a cloud service,” said Wayne M. Adams, Chairman, SNIA Board of Directors . “Scality as a new valued member of SNIA will further advance CSI’s deliverables with their knowledge and expertise in massively-scalable, high performance object-based cloud storage platforms and software developer programs.”