Scality ships RING9, software for unbreakable hybrid-cloud data storage

Scality has introduced today RING9 — the ninth generation of its leading RING scale-out file and object storage software — a solution that allows IT teams to build and run a modern hybrid-cloud data storage infrastructure with higher performance and efficiency.

RING9 is built on major investments in Scality’s flagship RING solution that enables IT teams to:  

• Fully leverage flash media through tiering and dynamic data protection policies.

• Modernise monitoring stack with Prometheus tools and APIs

• Streamline integration with API extensions to ecosystem partners such as Veeam and VMware Cloud Director (VCD)

With these new capabilities, RING9 further enhances and simplifies scale-out file and object storage for enterprises building private and hybrid cloud storage services with comprehensive AWS S3 and IAM compatibility.

“Scality is a strategic object storage provider we trust to house our customer’s data. Over the last several years, we’ve partnered closely with Scality to build a scalable and sovereign cloud service,” explained Laurent Cheyssial, CTO at Jaguar Network. “With the comprehensive AWS-compatible S3 API and user security management in RING9, we now have the flexibility to offer our customers cloud backup services for a wide variety of workloads while keeping data secure.”

“Scality continues to innovate in scale-out object and file storage as evidenced by its new multi-tiering capability. This new feature enables high performance with low-latency flash and increases storage efficiency with tiering as data ages. This will improve usages such as backups and medical imaging, as well as new latency-sensitive workloads in media by automatically optimising data placement,” said Randy Kerns, senior strategist and analyst at Evaluator Group.

Building on proven world-class enterprise and service provider deployments since 2010, RING9 enhancements are focused on:

High performance and storage efficiency: RING9 augments its use of the latest generations of flash media through the Storage Accelerator (SA), a powerful multi-level tiering capability. This enables dynamic tiering and data protection policies for ultra-fast IO to hot storage tiers via low-latency NVMe flash — with automated movement of data to increasingly more cost-effective tiers on lower-cost flash, such as quad-level cell (QLC), or on traditional hard disk drives (HDD).  These enhancements expand the addressable markets and use cases for RING9, and enable IT teams to address Tier 1, latency-sensitive workloads in media streaming, medical imaging and big data analytics that previously required a separate resource.

Modern stack administration: RING9 brings monitoring into the modern cloud-native data centre, with the integration of a new stack based on Prometheus and AlertManager, a new comprehensive UI dashboard with user actionable alerting. In addition, the Scality Cloud Monitor now enhances remote monitoring and observability for both customers and Scality’s premium Scale Care Services support offerings.

Ecosystem integration: RING9 streamlines the integration of its ecosystem partner products into a customer’s architecture, with support for:

• New APIs for enhanced monitoring, reporting and data placement in solutions from ecosystem partners such as Veeam and others

• Enhanced VMware vCloud (vCD) integration, including production use in existing real-world service provider deployments

• More comprehensive AWS IAM-compatible bucket policies to tighten security and access control

Paul Speciale, chief marketing officer at Scality, said: “As IT teams embrace the modern stack architecture, they need solutions that eliminate challenges in enterprise data management and storage in the hybrid cloud. Scality RING9 represents a major step change for the entire storage industry. Users gain improvements in storage efficiency through internal flash-to-disk tiering and dynamic data protection policies. For modern cloud-based data centres, RING9 fits naturally into the monitoring and observability ecosystem with support for Prometheus and Elastic Cloud. RING9 expands the addressable market and use-case workloads for RING further into the high-performance arena.”