Scality RING 7.4 'sets new standard' for ease-of-use in scale-out SDS

Over the past decade, consumers of petabyte-scale storage have come to rely on the robust capabilities and economies of Scality RING. Some of their stories are described in this newly-published IDC white paper sponsored by HPE: The Business Value of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Scalable Object Storage with Scality RING for Data-Intensive Applications and Services, which quantifies huge, real-world economic advantages for customers using Scality RING Software-Defined Storage on HPE servers. The analysis shows the value that customers are achieving as a result of their moves to Scality on HPE servers at an average of $898,970 per PB per year ($5.48 million per organisation) over three years. 

Having already achieved leadership in terms of vision, capabilities and economics, Scality chose operational ease as a focus for version 7.4 of the RING, starting with development of an easy-to-use window into monitoring and management of servers via its new RING Supervisor UI, a comprehensive, unified portal for all aspects of management and monitoring of the RING’s native AWS S3 and file (NFS, SMB) storage interfaces. And, to enhance deployment ease, Scality RING 7.4 introduces the unified Installer, which enables customers to deploy the RING easily in under an hour on any of 45 reference platform architectures, including the new 3-server entry point configurations on HPE Apollo 4200/4510 server platforms.

“With support for the 3-server configurations on HPE Apollo 4200 and 4510 servers, we enable all of the benefits of the RING at a new and affordable entry point for customers in industries such as healthcare,” said Patrick Osborne, VP & GM Big Data and Secondary Storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “With the inherent scalability properties of our HPE Scalable Object Storage with Scality RING, this provides a future-proof solution for customers’ scale-out file and object storage requirements.”

RING 7.4 brings a new “at-a-glance” dashboard with REST API, unified trending and forecasting metrics and KPIs, monitoring, alerts, server and disk monitoring for HPE Apollo server platforms and easy point-and-click provisioning of S3 and file system services.  And, the UI now accommodates private labelling so partners and cloud providers can brand their Scality RING  solutions. That, along with a new Service Provider portal that provides secure management of the RING’s integrated AWS-compatible Identity and Access Management (IAM) multi-tenancy services, including provisioning of new Accounts, Users, Groups and Policies, plus an S3 browser that provides integrated management of S3 Buckets and Object data, enhances its features for cloud providers.

“Our strategic focus for the RING is to make Software Defined Storage as close to appliance-like experience as possible, while preserving the full freedom of choice and scalability benefits of SDS,” said Pierre Derome, Vice President Engineering at Scality. “Emphasising the user experience for all aspects of RING 7.4, we have further reduced OPEX by cutting the time needed to deploy and operate the RING at multi-petabyte scale.”

"As a result of extensive testing and comparison, we chose Scality RING for our medical imaging archive," said Dave Revell, CIO, Radia, Inc. "Having made the choice to move forward with Scality RING, we recently installed version 7.4. Installation was a breeze; the new user interface takes the solution the extra mile. Our vetting process convinced us that it was the most solid and robust storage solution for our use case; now the new user interface makes interacting with the storage easier, giving us powerful, easy-to-use tools for managing the storage." 

“Data is the new basis for competitive advantage,” said Amita Potnis, Research Manager for IDC. “The new RING 7.4 expands on Scality’s strengths in scalability, data durability and availability by enhancing ease-of-use to further extend the operational efficiencies for data-intensive use cases. Making it easy to provision storage, protect data and keep it at hand is key to competitiveness in today’s data-intensive world.”