Scality is a global company based in San Francisco, California that develops software-defined object storage. The Scality scale-out object storage software platform called RING is the company's commercial product. Scality RING software deploys on industry-standard x86 servers to store objects and files. Scality also offers a number of open source tools called Zenko, including Zenko CloudServer, compatible with the Amazon S3 API.
History
Scality was founded in 2009 by Jérôme Lecat, Giorgio Regni, Daniel Binsfeld, Serge Dugas, and Brad King. Scality raised $7 million of venture capital funding in March 2011. A C-round of $22 million was announced in June 2013, led by Menlo Ventures and Iris Capital with participation from FSN PME and all existing investors, including Idinvest Partners, OMNES Capital and Galileo Partners. Scality raised $45 million in August 2015. This Series D funding was led by Menlo Ventures with participation from all existing investors and one new strategic investor, BroadBand Tower. In 2016, HPE made a in the company. In April, 2018, the company announced a $60 million round of funding. Scality announced a refreshed brand, along with a global distribution agreement with HP in October 2014. Scality added Dell and Cisco as global resellers in 2015.
Products
RING
Scality's principal product is a scale-out object storage software platform known as the RING. Scality's RING delivers petabyte-scale software-defined storage designed to use commodity hardware and characterized by cost-effective scaling, performance, and auto-recovery. Scality's RING is a multitier architecture and can scale up to thousands of servers and functionally up to 100 petabytes under a single global namespace, although the product is coded to handle more. It allows customers to deploy both performance-optimized and capacity-optimized storage, varied data durability levels, and small to large object or file support in a single global namespace. Scality's Ring product depends on a keyspace calculated using a Monte Carlo simulation at install, spread across all of its node servers. While the company aims for the Ring to function without the need of any external management process, a Supervisor server is functionally required to kick-off data integrity operations and keep track of node state, while also providing a single source of truth for data about the ring itself. The Supervisor process is relatively lightweight and can be installed on a node server if required, but the company recommends it run separately from the Ring's constituent storage servers. The Ring employs erasure coding schemes in multiples of six, which is the minimum number of storage nodes required to install a Ring. The underlying filesystem formatted on the storage drives is transparent to the Ring and it does not interact with filesystem operations directly. The Ring installer was originally written in Python for Saltstack, but has been re-implemented closed-source. Object Storage is one of the fastest growing segments of the Enterprise Storage Market. According to the IDC report “Worldwide File – and Object – Based Storage Forecast, 2016 – 2020”, it is estimated that object-based storage capacity is expected to grow at a CAGR of 30.7 percent from 2016 to 2020, reaching 293.7EB in 2020. The Scality RING is software that turns any standard x86 servers into web-scale storage. Scality claims that their RING product can scale capacity indefinitely, and guarantees 100% availability while reducing costs over legacy systems.
Zenko
Zenko is Scality's open source multi-cloud data controller. Zenko integrates data managed on-premises with services available in public clouds. Zenko CloudServer is an Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service-compatible open source object storage server. The code is written in Node.js. It is a single instance running in a Docker container, and it uses Docker volumes for persistent storage. CloudServer uses the same code as the Scality RING S3 interface and includes an Apache 2.0 license. Note, it is not a distributed system. However, it does have the same level of compatibility as the S3 interface for the Scality RING. Zenko Orbit is a cloud-based portal for data placement, workflows, and global metadata search. The product enables asynchronous replication between clouds.
Scality released version 4.3 of the RING software in July 2014, improving performance, adding replication options, and introducing a redesigned management GUI.
In November 2014, Scality made generally available a plug-in for OpenStack Swift, enabling Swift-compatible applications to use the Scality RING as a storage backend without modification. Scality also released an open-source driver that enables the creation of block storage volumes that can connect to CDMI-compatible storage backends.
Scality released version 5.0 of the RING software in March 2015, simplifying installation and configuration, expanding Windows support, and improving video streaming and content distribution performance
Version 6.0 of the Scality RING was introduced in 2016
Scality open sourced their object server frontend called that implements the AWS S3 API in July 2017, the source code is available on under an Apache 2.0 license and prebuilt containers are available on
Scality RING7 launched in June, 2017 with enhanced security and multi-cloud file and object storage.
Scality has been recognized consistently over the years for object-based storage by IDC. In Gartner's first Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage Scality was ranked a leader. Scality was a 2014 storage system software finalist by Storage Magazine. In 2017 Scality was again ranked a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage.
