With RING Organic Storage 4.0

Scality RING 4.0 introduces standard file-based access thanks to a scale-out file system. Unlike other storage vendors who deliver multiple interfaces by placing a gateway in front of their underlying storage research, Scality is delivering file access with its own completely parallel design. As a result, the Scality file system benefits from the same performance, fault tolerance, self-healing, and organic growth characteristics intrinsic to its pioneering RING platform. Particularly, the ability to deploy a large number of connectors with shared metadata on a global namespace assures the delivery of virtually unlimited IOPS for file applications.

ARC was unveiled today, as part of the RING 4.0 release. It represents a new way to protect data against failures. This feature is based on erasure code research, which has been used in the Telecommunications industry for some years. At very large scale, RAID 5 and 6 present serious vulnerabilities in terms of risk exposure and cost, which makes them unviable for such use cases.

Combination

Scality chooses a combination by default, where 16 represents the number of original data fragments and 4 the number of tolerated failures. In this configuration Scality ARC accommodates 4 simultaneous failures, whether they result from disks, servers, networks, racks or sites. In terms of storage consumption, ARC adds only 25% more storage than raw data globally, a drastic reduction from 2 or 3 copies in a replication environment.

In a report published today, ESG Lab has evaluated the performance of Scality’s first tier when deployed with SSD and found that it delivers no more than 7 ms latency for complete read or write operations on 4 KB objects, and a throughput comparable with high performance computing systems.

The conclusion of its report

In the conclusion of its report, ESG Lab writes “Until now, object storage could deliver the scalability, however not the performance. Standard response times for object-based storage are in the hundreds of milliseconds to full seconds, much too slow for today’s cloud-based services. In comparison, ESG testing demonstrated that Scality object storage on Intel Xeon servers equipped with Intel Enterprise SSDs and low-latency 10GbE network environment delivers 4-10 millisecond performance—10 times faster than other scale-out systems. The Scality solution delivers scalable object storage in which performance is never a barrier. Users can solve any performance problem with this architecture just by selecting the right number and types of server nodes and disk.”