SFR (Société française du radiotéléphone) is a French telecommunications company that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to consumers and businesses. SFR is owned by Altice Europe.

COMPANY STATS

Solution Components

Software-Defined Storage

• Scality RING
• File and Object NFS, SFUSED, Rs2 storage interface
• Geo-distributed

SFR Relies on Scality RING for Multiple Applications

21 Million Customers

Founded in 1987, SFR is France’s number one alternative telecoms operator, providing voice, video, data, and internet telecommunications services, as well as professional services for consumers and businesses. Today, SFR serves more than 21 million customers.

SFR Serves over 1 Million Users with Scality RING.

In 2010, SFR was looking to consolidate storage for internal storage services, including backup and archiving. The flexibility of the RING platform as well as the low TCO and easy scalability led the team to choose Scality.

In 2012, SFR decided to use the RING for external services: SFR Sync and SFR Backup were the first applications to be offered to consumer and business customers. A CDN service was added to the portfolio in 2014. SFR uses no less than 5 (out of 10 available) file and object connectors to connect its applications to the Scality RING. The SFR Cloud features both in-house and 3rd party applications, and the choice of interfaces saved time in launching those new services.

The company has been an industry leader through innovation.

In 2004, the group was the first French operator to launch a bid for a 3G mobile phone network and in 2012 it was the first operator to offer 4G services.

Over the past five years, SFR has continued its tradition of innovation by leveraging the flexibility of the Scality RING to build a broad portfolio of cloud-based services including online backup and archiving, file sync and share applications, and several mobile applications – all from a single, shared storage environment.

The Importance of Hardware Freedom.

SFR has taken advantage of the RING’s hardware-agnostic architecture: the current SFR underlying physical storage cluster comprises a mix of different HPE servers, with different form factors and density. For its initial deployment of the Scality RING, SFR selected HPE’s ProLiant DL180 (G6) servers. To increase cost-efficiency without sacrificing flexibility or performance, SFR expanded the ProLiant servers with the HPE 600 Modular Disk System. Later capacity expansions – and replacements – would leverage newer SL4540 ProLiant servers.

The success of SFR and Scality is a strong example of how software-defined storage enables service providers to generate revenue by expanding their services beyond their traditional offerings. Highlights include:

• Serves over a million users with more than a dozen RING-based apps
• Storage for both external customers and internal users
• Doubling to 6 PB in a year, transparently