In addition to performance and capacity scaling (billions of objects and a large number of petabytes can be supported in Scality RINGs), the company’s highly parallel software intelligence has no single point of failure--some software resides permanently on each cell's server. Multiple copies of the data are made for protection and recovery purposes. Altogether, that leads to Scality RING systems being highly resilient and self-healing.
Sounds excellent overall, but two key questions remain: How much does Scality’s RING solution cost for primary storage and for long-term storage? Scality claims its five-year total-cost-of-ownership calculations show its solution costs a little more than a third of what a comparable SAN or NAS solution would cost. Scality also says that RING solutions cost only half as much as similarly featured long-term storage solutions offered by existing cloud suppliers such as Amazon S3, which uses object-based storage, as well.
When a new computing world model, such as cloud computing, arises, the old way of doing business, including architecture, may be subject to radical rethinking and change. That is what Scality is betting on with its Scality RING Organic Storage. Scality is not alone in this space--other vendors are developing their own innovative object-based storage solutions for cloud environments.
Scality feels that it can run rings around its competitors (sorry, I couldn’t resist), and who knows? It may be right.
Scality has a good story to tell. Now it comes down to how well it executes and delivers on its promises and whether or not an upstart company that is not yet on the radar screens of many prospective customers has an even better solution. However, Scality has raised the stakes, so any challenger would have a lot of work to do. From a management, architecture and price/performance perspective, service providers may very well want to give Scality a close look.
At the time of publication, Scality is not a client of David Hill and the Mesabi Group.
