Scality RING Organic is storage infrastructure for large scale unstructured data: a unique and paradigm-shifting solution to the escalating challenges of unstructured data storage at very large scale.
The amount of unstructured data is rapidly growing beyond the capabilities of traditional storage infrastructure solutions. At the same time, user expectations for security, performance and reliability steadily increase, becoming more and more demanding year by year. This situation has produced an urgent and widespread need for innovative technologies that deliver massive scalability with uncompromising performance, security and consistent reliability.
Innovations along these lines have first been broached in academic and research papers, and implemented in part by Google and Amazon for their own data storage projects, including BigTable, Google File System and Dynamo. Scality was similarly inspired by these same seeds of brilliance, resulting in the development of RING, a state-of-the-art object storage platform.
RING offers its customers an on-premise storage solution, similar to those deployed by Google or Amazon within their own data centers. RING gives private cloud administrators the means to approach the exceptional, almost mythic levels of scalability, performance, resilience and affordability previously available only to Google and Amazon. RING’s customers have access to these same uncompromising characteristics while maintaining full control of their datacenter (DC), hardware, applications and data.
Scality RING delivers carrier-grade storage based on commodity x86 servers. The RING Organic Storage solution uses a distributed, decentralized and geo-redundant
peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture where data is evenly spread among all participating storage servers. The system is therefore an aggregation of independent, loosely coupled servers in a “shared nothing” model, logically unified in a “ring” to provide uniquely linear scalability both in capacity and performance, with cost efficiency and comprehensive data protection.
Scality’s offering includes a suite of high-end features and modules including key format and generation, P2P extensions, a key/value store engine, automatic tiering, erasure coding, parallel architecture and file abstraction layers.
Scality RING is in essence a pure object store, but it has evolved over the past few years to incorporate many application extensions and several core features, with the capability of accessing the RING through a variety of protocols. Scality continues to add support for new applications and access protocols, most recently, the Scale-Out File System (SOFS) and a Digital Media package. Looking ahead, Scality plans to add a native block storage interface, enabling delivery of a fully comprehensive unified storage platform.
Scality RING’s intrinsic flexibility allows you to choose between a pure capacity approach, a performance-oriented model or a mixed configuration. All of these options can be delivered without compromising cost efficiency or administrative ease of use.
Scality RING relies on three key principles:
- “Divide and Conquer”: The load is shared across nodes that function in parallel.
- “Divide and Deliver”: Using an independent and decentralized P2P approach.
- “Divide and Store”: By distributing objects to several nodes without the need to shard the data.
Scality offers integration packages for:
- Email systems
- Storage-as-a-service (StaaS) applications, fully compatible with the Amazon S3 API
- File environments, with the Scale Out File System
- Digital media, especially for CDN environments