Scality: 1Tbt/s Performance for Scale-Out File System in Microsoft Azure Public Cloud

Scality SA announced the technical preview of its performance Scale-Out File System (SOFS) in Microsoft Azure.

SOFS running in Azure delivers linear scaling performance for read- and write-intensive workloads. It performance running in Azure was measured at 1Tb/s – the equivalent of downloading 50 high-definition movies per second.

The service is up to 10x less expensive than other file services capable of delivering similar performance, because SOFS leverages Azure Blob storage, giving customers access to limitless storage at $0.0184/GB/month. And, with Azure Storage Reserved Capacity, customers save over 30% off standard pricing.

Most other cloud file services sit on VMs and can only use capacity allocated to the local VMs on which they run. This local storage model is expensive and limited in its ability to scale out.

“In late 2019, we decided to port our proven SOFS code base to Azure,” said Giorgio Regni, CTO and co-founder. “The combination of customer interest in hybrid cloud or pure cloud use cases with some of Azure’s differentiated features, such as a single API for storage tiers and Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), enabled us to quickly deliver an integrated solution on top of Azure Blob storage.“

SOFS running in Azure provides a stateless, POSIX-compatible interface supporting SMB 3.0 as well as NFS v3 and v4.1. The solution is hosted in a customer’s Azure subscription and connects to the customer’s Azure Blob storage accounts. Any number of VMs can be spun up on-demand to linearly scale performance, and SOFS tiers data across Azure Blob to optimize performance and costs. Leveraging low-cost VMs and limitless object storage allows SOFS running in Azure to offer fast performance at a low cost that can scale to hundreds of petabytes of data. And because the solution supports ADLS Gen2, data remains in native Azure format and accessible by any Azure service for use cases including data analytics, ML and more.

SOFS has been available as part of the company’s on-premises storage solution, RING, since 2013. It is a feature-rich, POSIX-compatible file system with enterprise security and both synchronous and asynchronous replication to provide a complete solution for data center recovery.

SOFS is used in daily production by hundreds of global customers supporting large-scale, mission-critical deployments for petabyte-scale use cases. Today, it supports on-premises applications with high-aggregate performance requirements, such as massive-scale file systems (10 and 20PB SMB shares), 1PB per day ingest rates of logs, healthcare-critical deployments for medical imaging, recording and broadcasting of hundreds of simultaneous high-definition channels, and long-term asset preservation in national libraries. All of these applications can now be deployed in Azure cloud without modification.

SOFS running in Azure builds on the company’s multi-year collaboration with Azure, which has resulted in an Amazon S3 to Azure Blob translation solution available in Azure Marketplace, Zenko Connect, as well as support for the Azure Blob API as a connector to on-premises storage solution RING.

“We are glad to continue our ongoing collaboration with Scality,” said Tad Brockway, corporate VP, networking and storage, Microsoft Corp. “Their ability to rapidly port Scality SOFS to the Azure platform speaks to the advantages Azure is able to offer our many ISV partners.“

SOFS running in Azure is currently available as a technical preview.

Resources:
Azure Solution page
IDC Spotlight: The Value of an On-Demand, Scale-Out File System on Low-Cost Cloud Storage     
Blog: How we built a hyperscale cloud file system on Azure

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