Scality, a San Francisco-based storage software company, announced at this year’s VMware VMworld conference a major new update to the company’s distributed, object-based storage software platform.
In addition to a big performance increase, 95 percent faster than its predecessor in file operations and random IO, RING 5.0 promises to enable ‘Amazon EBS-like’ virtual machine (VM) Storage to enterprise data cloud centers and cloud services providers.
Launched in 2008, Amazon EBS, short for Elastic Block Store, is the cloud computing giant’s persistent block level storage volume solution for the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances. Available in both SSD- or HDD-backed flavors, EBS provides highly-available cloud storage for enterprise applications, databases and backups.
Scality is extending those capabilities to virtualized data centers.
RING 5.0 enables organizations to “run multiple cloud storage workloads, across file, object and VM applications, in one single petabyte-scale storage environment,” the company said in a statement. A single RING storage environment can linearly scale to support “hundreds of thousands of VMs.”
In terms of performance, the software matches Amazon EBS at 200 input/output operations per second (IOPS) per VM, claimed the company. In bursting scenarios, RING 5.0 can deliver up to 3,000 IOPS per VM. Hypervisor support includes VMware and KVM.
RING 5.0 introduces support for OpenStack Cinder, the block storage component that first appeared in the 2012 ‘Folsom’ release of the open source cloud stack platform. Also new are a redesigned GUI, support for standard DevOps tools and automated management features.
RING 5.0 also advances Scality’s software-defined data center (SDDC) strategy by improving automation of deployment, installation, and management with support of standard DevOps tools and a redesigned GUI. This includes support of OpenStack Cinder to programmatically provision Scality VM storage.
The economics of RING 5.0 favor Scality’s approach, asserted the company.
By offering unified storage for both application data and VMs, the firm’s software delivers storage costs 10X lower cost per terabyte than all-flash arrays and specialized VM storage appliances, according to the company’s estimates. Compared to EMC’s Isilon NAS, RING cuts the cost of petabyte-scale storage by 50 to 70 percent, the company boasted.
According to 451 Research vice president Simon Robinson, RING 5.0 lives up to the now-ubiquitous “software-defined” label.
“By offering a straight software play that supports multiple, enterprise-level workloads — supporting file, object and now VM-level access — on a single platform, Scality offers one of the most complete software-defined storage platforms we have seen to date,” he said in prepared remarks.