STaaS customers start with GBs of data that rapidly expand to TBs. It doesn’t take that many customers to quickly consume PBs of capacity and billions of objects. EBs are not just theoretical to the STaaS provider; exabyte capacity storage is real and imminent. Concurrently, geographically dispersed users challenge the STaaS provider to distribute copies of the data across vast distances.
Key STaaS Market Challenges with Traditional Data Storage
To make STaaS into a viable business, data storage must overcome the following challenges:
- Incapacity to scale storage to the high levels required by STaaS
Traditional solutions lead to storage system sprawl, with excessive expenditures of time and money on management, infrastructure, and ongoing data migrations—all in an ultimately futile effort to chase down the root causes of data storage and retrieval problems.
- Incompatibility with distributed and shared geographic access
Storage solutions must support a wide variety of workgroups, contractors, or customers located in dispersed geographic locations with concurrent local access to verify, edit, change, add, convert, rework, or manipulate content.
- Excessive HA and DR costs and complications
With traditional storage, high availability and disaster recovery are predicated on storing multiple copies of data. Expensive hardware and data center doubling (or even tripling) to accommodate the explosion in data add to storage system complexity and lead ultimately to operator and customer frustration.
- Exceedingly High TCO
Total cost of ownership is based on a model that does not work for Rich Media organizations, where content is king.
Nonstop exponential data storage growth is particularly glaring to STaaS service providers, since just a small change in the number of customers can cause stored data to expand by multiple orders of magnitude. Unstructured data (such as user photos, blogs, and videos) rapidly consumes available storage capacity, as current service users accelerate their storage usage over time.
Traditional or legacy storage makes life quite complicated for the STaaS storage administrator in meeting the challenge of exponential data growth, and often fails. It tends to be overly complex, making it exceedingly difficult to expand object or file storage capacity to the levels commonly required for STaaS services, and to maintain system performance at the same time. If all of the service clients were co-located with the STaaS, this would be a very difficult problem. However, users are geographically distributed all over the globe, requiring multiple data centers. It’s even more complicated when users of the same organization in different localions require access to the same files.
STaaS must not ever be offline or the service provider’s reputation is seriously damaged, causing users to look for more reliable alternatives elsewhere. However, traditional storage systems require massively complicated workarounds that frequently break, causing loss of productivity and lost data. Traditional storage is incapable of remaining online without incurring incredibly high costs to compensate for scheduled or unscheduled maintenance tasks that would otherwise interfere with data availability—costs that are impractical for the STaaS service provider.
During a tech refresh, data migration alone severely impacts storage uptime and availability. In those corner cases where traditional storage can meet the challenges of scaling, distributed access, and availability, it does so at such an exceedingly high cost (both upfront and ongoing), that it becomes financially untenable for the STaaS service business.
Essential STaaS Requirements
Geographically dispersed STaaS data requires a storage system container that can distribute data to the location that best meets service level agreements (SLAs), and that provides the best combination of performance, service, and availability to the STaaS customer. A geographically dispersed customer base creates the requirement for always up and available storage, 7 x 24 x 365. STaaS storage must provide for transparent tech refreshes, and enable all scheduled and unscheduled maintenance tasks without any user disruption. It must fulfill all of the following requirements:
- Ability to scale to billions of objects while maintaining performance for all users without disruption
STaaS storage must be able to accommodate PBs to EBs of capacity, and billions of objects or files, with satisfactory performance for millions of concurrent users.
- Ability to share files across geographically distributed locations
Files and data must be movable, based on policy, to where they are required when they are required.
- Always available and online
Five nines (99.999%) availability all the time.
- Competitive TCO
Increased market domination by Amazon, Google, and other mega service providers requires the lowest possible total cost of ownership to be competitive.
Decreasing margins and increasing competition has put added pressure on STaaS providers to meet or exceed storage requirements at the lowest possible TCO. Especially given the broad revenue variability of the StaaS provider business, a storage system with pay-by-the-drink (pay-per-use) pricing would seem to be a much better fit than the upfront pricing of traditional storage (pricing for fixed, preset storage capacity).
The Solution: Scality RING™ Organic Storage
Scality RING Organic Storage is architected from the ground up to meet and exceed all STaaS provider requirements. It scales capacity into the exabytes, files or objects into the billions, and can do so over a geographically dispersed area. The scalability of the RING solution is the direct result of its unique Distributed Hash Table (DHT). DHT is an extraordinarily efficient lookup methodology that enables storage and retrieval of very large numbers of files or objects at a very high level of performance.
Scality Organic RING Storage Solution Diagram
Scality RING Organic Storage provides unparalleled data, nodal, and system availability by leveraging its distinctive industry-hardened, carrier-grade peer-to-peer technology. The RING also comes with unequalled built-in system data resilience similar to an organic immune system. Every node constantly monitors a limited number of its peers, automatically rebalancing replicas and load to make the system fully self-healing without human intervention. Consistent hashing guarantees that only a small subset of keys is ever affected by a node failure or removal.
The RING also rebalances the data load automatically when a node fails, is removed or upgraded, or when new nodes are added. RING makes technology refresh a simple, online process with no application disruptions, eliminating data migration, long nights, and sleepless weekends. The result is a very high level of fault tolerance because the system stays reliable even with nodes joining or leaving the ring. Scality RING keeps costs low by enabling the use of standard off-the-shelf commodity server nodes, and through the use of a paradigm-shifting pay-by-the-drink pricing model. Unlike traditional storage, Scality RING charges are based on used capacity, not raw storage capacity, thereby assuring the lowest possible storage TCO.
ABOUT SCALITY
Scality is the developer of RING, a software platform enabling cloud storage to easily scale up to exabytes using commodity server hardware with direct attached storage. Scality delivers the performance and reliability of a SAN- or NAS-based architecture without the aggravations of volume management—at one third to one half the cost.
Business uses for Scality RING include Rich Media, Web 2.0, Email storage (for millions of users), Storage-as-a-Service, and other cloud computing service applications. Deployments manage billion of files while meeting or exceeding the high performance expectations of application users. Scality RING is based on a patented object storage technology that delivers high availability, ease of operations, and total data control.
PARTNER FOR SUCCESS
Partnering with Scality means gaining access to Scality’s extensive storage and market expertise, innovative technologies, pay-as-you-go pricing, intuitive integrated billing, training, business planning, best practices, branding, business tools, and even lead generation. Best of all, service providers are able to continue using the applications and tools at their disposal, enabling and facilitating uninterrupted market growth. This permits investment to match revenue models, providing an immediate ROI, without the limitations of traditional storage solutions.
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