SGI announces OEM partnership with Scality for scale-out storage solution

Scality RING is perfectly suited for tier one environments

New Object- and File-based Storage Solution Leads the Industry in Density and Performance

FREMONT, CA. — January 22, 2013 — SGI (NASDAQ: SGI) SGI (NASDAQ: SGI), the trusted leader in technical computing, today announced a strategic OEM agreement with Scality, a leader in software-defined storage, to provide a unified scale-out storage solution that offers both extreme scale and high performance, allowing customers to manage massive unstructured data sprawl. 

Bundled together with the extreme 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 maximum data security in the minimum of datacenter real estate. A single 19″ rack can house nearly three petabytes of scale-out storage with total 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 at 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 wide range of application needs, Scality RING is perfectly suited for tier one environments with very 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 very 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 wide 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 perfect match for Scality software, offering two high-performance dual socket servers powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, and up to 72 3.5″ hard disk drives in a single 4U chassis. This represents up to 280 TB of storage, reserving two disks for system tasks, in just a 4U chassis. Expanding the system is easy – simply add more SGI MIS units and the Scality 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 a leader in high-performance and active archive storage solutions, with customers purchasing nearly 600 petabytes of disk-based storage in 2012 alone. SGI’s industry-leading storage software ecosystem and best-of-breed 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, vice president 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.”

Availability

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