Scality RING organic storage: rethinking storage for the cloud era

Storage at scale pioneer demonstrates start-up success, big commercial deals, strong partnerships and widespread industry recognition

San Francisco — February 14th, 2012 Storage at scale pioneer Scality’s success in 2011 secured its position as a trailblazer for truly scalable, high performing, yet cost effective object based storage. 2011 was a landmark year for the San Francisco-based storage start-up that has invigorated the cloud storage space with the new concept of organic storage. The year’s highlights started with a new multimillion dollar round of funding to fuel global expansion, a great deal of industry recognition, and ended with a raft of new customers and partners less than two years after the company’s inception.

“The storage industry has never looked so alive and dynamic, and Scality is excited to be part of the step change happening at the heart of it,” said Jérôme Lecat, CEO of Scality. “When we burst onto the cloud storage scene just 18 months ago, we determined to rip up the old storage rulebook. We wanted to address the real challenges the industry is facing: Achieving performance and scalability and reducing TCO simultaneously. This has always been seen as a storage nirvana, but we have led the charge to make it happen.”

Lecat added, “Developing organic storage as an evolution of object storage helped us unite these three key elements and make the industry’s storage dreams a reality. Object storage is still in its infancy, but let’s challenge ourselves and the industry to do a better job explaining the technology, as well as making it even simpler to deploy in large corporate environments.”

Scality confirmed its technical leadership last year, introducing two product releases, delivering many features previously reserved for enterprise class storage, and introducing organic storage as the only object-based technology able to deliver both the performance required by the “Cloud Era” and the cost-efficiency of Petabyte level storage.

2011 – A tremendous year of growth

Scality achieved a 120% growth rate and signed agreements supporting over 50 million users worldwide on cloud-based applications such as Email, Photo Sharing and File Sharing.

The company strengthened its leadership in the primary and secondary storage market for large webmail platforms with support of all the largest platforms in the market: Openwave, Critical Path, Zimbra, Dovecot and Cyrus.

In March, Scality secured an additional US $7 million worth of funding in a series-B financing round led by Idinvest Partners and with existing shareholders Crédit Agricole Private Equity, Galiléo Partners. The company has now raised a total of $13 million.

It also secured its position as a truly global force by landing marquee Service Provider customers including:

Time Warner Cable, one of the largest cable operators in North America;
Libero, the largest email provider in Italy;
Leading German social networking website Wer-Kennt-Wen;
Prominent UK web hosting provider Webfusion;
NIFTY, a Fujitsu subsidiary and one of the leading internet service providers (ISPs) in Japan;
GNAX, a US provider of cloud hosting and computing services.

2011 also marked the first steps into enterprise cloud deployments in unstructured data intensive verticals such as media and healthcare. Key accounts secured in those sectors included:

DLR, the German Aerospace Agency, for the storage of high definition satellite pictures
and FranceTelevisions, the largest media group in France.

Scality tripled its partner ecosystem, adding key partnerships with CTERA Networks, Gladinet, Nuxeo, Panzura, Parallels, TwinStrata and TeamDrive. Scality expects its network of partners to continue to grow dramatically in 2012.

Finally, the company also demonstrated its continued commitment to supporting open source standards with public support for CDMI, the Storage Networking Industry Association’s open cloud storage standard.