Scality OEM of SGI

Silicon Graphics International Corp. announced a strategic OEM agreement with Scality, in software-defined storage, to provide a unified scale-out storage solution that offers extreme scale and performance, allowing customers to manage massive unstructured data sprawl.

Bundled together with the density of the SGI Modular InfiniteStorage (SGI MIS) platform, Scality’s RING Organic Storage software, enables enterprises to take advantage of a converged multi-petabyte storage architecture, that scales to billions of files with data security in the minimum of datacenter real estate.

A single 19" rack can house nearly 3PB of scale-out storage with data security and no single point of failure. This enables a self-healing infrastructure that can grow as needed with no data migration or downtime required.

"Scale-out object-based solutions are designed to address this particular set of problems by minimizing manual intervention for storage expansions, migrations, and recoveries from storage system failure," said Ashish Nadkarni, research director, Storage Systems, IDC. "Such a dispersed, fault-tolerant architecture enables IT organizations to more efficiently absorb data growth in a manner that is predicable for the long term."
 
Deployed for a range of applications, RING is suited for tier one environments with demanding applications in term of IOPS and latency, but also for ‘storage capacity’ oriented applications with millions of users, such as online storage services or long-term archives.

From an application standpoint, the appliance presents a unified data interface capable of delivering local and remote, object and file access. The platform is self-healing, affording high levels of data durability, provided by replication and erasure coding techniques. Optional configurations offer geo-redundancy and auto-tiering. Designed as a massively parallel system, Scality can scale to accommodate a variety of different capacity and performance profiles.

This means data administrators no longer need to worry about data silos filling up or manually managing load balancing from one tier or platform to another. This solution enables a unified, efficient and cost-effective approach to long-term data management.

The SGI MIS storage server platform is a match for Scality software, offering two high-performance dual socket servers powered by Intel Xeon processors, and up to 72 3.5" HDDs in a single 4U chassis. This represents up to 280TB of storage, reserving two disks for system tasks, in a 4U chassis. Expanding the system is easy – add more SGI MIS units and the software will automatically detect and load balance across the entire infrastructure.

"The combination of Scality RING and SGI MIS storage server represents an important step for the storage industry coupling together the densest storage server and our very comprehensive storage software offering," said Jerome Lecat, CEO, Scality. "SGI’s selection of Scality’s software, validates our technology leadership and commitment to address enterprise challenges, as illustrated by deployments at a leading online storage provider."

SGI has long been in high-performance and active archive storage solutions, with customers purchasing nearly 600PBs of disk-based storage in 2012. SGI’s storage software ecosystem and hardware have resulted in the company being at the forefront of solving some of the world’s largest data management challenges in media archives, life sciences, manufacturing and other data-intensive industries.

"One of the key challenges of scale-out storage solutions is to deliver the self-healing advantages of object-based storage while also maintaining the performance requirements needed at the application layer," said Jose Reinoso, VP of storage engineering, SGI. "Scality’s RING architecture allows us to offer our customers cost-efficient petabyte-scale storage with independent scaling of throughput. It is the best of both worlds."

With an initial deployment already underway at a large cloud-based solution provider, the SGI solution powered by Scality is available for early access customers.