Hybrid Cloud, thanks to its flexibility when deploying compute and storage, is the deployment architecture that most organizations are choosing for their cloud strategy. The challenge is that hybrid cloud, by its very nature, means that data is distributed across private and public clouds. Increasingly, organizations are not using a single public cloud provider either; they are using a combination of multiple public and regional providers to meet all their needs. At the same time data is growing both in numbers of objects and in total capacity.
Distributed computing and datasets combined with overall data growth is creating a cloud data management avalanche that organizations need to prepare for now. The hybrid cloud takes the current data silo problem to a whole new level as data is scattered across the globe. Governance demands on data compounds the data silo problem.
Unstructured Data will be the source of the avalanche, as according to IDC over 80% of data growth is from unstructured data. Another challenge is the potential billions of edge consumers and devices all collecting data for analysis and storage.
In the new cloud era, data management becomes a must have capability for IT departments. IT Professionals need to not only meet the immediate capacity and performance demands placed on these datasets but they also need to have visibility and control over all unstructured data assets no matter where they are physically stored.
Scality Update
Scality is one of the leading object storage providers in the market today, with ten years of experience in delivering cost-effective, scalable storage based on the Scality Ring architecture. Ring is a software-defined, native file and object storage solution designed for on-premises, large scale, storage of unstructured data. Its peer to peer architecture provides nearly unlimited scalability, excellent scale-out performance and an adaptive set of data protection mechanisms.
Scality Zenko is a multi-cloud solution that provides a single, unified API across all clouds to simplify application development and the movement of dataset between clouds. It stores data in standard cloud formats to make data consumable directly by native cloud applications and servers. It also provides global search across all managed data, independent of cloud location.
What’s New at Scality?
In its latest announcement, Scality is updating its RING software and integrating Zenko into the solution, giving RING native multi-cloud capabilities. Scality Ring’s latest release, RING8, is designed to make the solution even more appealing to enterprises and service providers. First, RING8 improves its enterprise security capabilities by including a new Key Management System integration via KMIP 1.2. It can also deploy on SE Linux “enforced mode” and eliminate the requirement of root access.
RING8 also includes enhancements for Service Providers, a key part of Scality’s customer base. RING8 provides S3 based quotas for storage as a service (STaaS). It also includes AWS compatible IAM Bucket Policies that complement previous IAM User/Group Policies
Both enterprises and service providers can take advantage of the enhancements to Scality’s Cloud Native Storage support. New in RING8 are AWS S3 Bucket Lifecycle transition API (XDM) & Bucket Notification API support as well as OpenStack Swift API support for the latest releases of OpenStack. RING8 also continues Scality’s excellent support with new scale-out NFS v4 and new IPv6 support for NFS and SMB with native encryption.
RING8 XDM (eXtended Data Management)
The previously mentioned XDM capabilities mean that ZENKO multi-cloud data orchestration is integrated into RING. This capability extends RING8 core functionality to almost any cloud storage source. It provides a global metadata namespace, visibility and search across multiple RINGs and public clouds. Organizations can replicate and perform multi-cloud replication and lifecycle tiering across any combination of sources and targets. Organizations can leverage an on-premises RING and then as data ages, tier that data to Public Cloud Storage for long term retention.
ZENKO Updates
ZENKO provides data visibility, control and orchestration across multiple clouds and Scality RINGS. In addition to the new lifecycle transition policies, ZENKO also introduces native support for NAS Filers and RING SOFS. It has policies to “cloud transform” filers, with discovery and import of existing NAS data. Lifecycle policies can be applied to these filers, moving data to RING or public cloud storage. It also enables NAS data to be accessed via RESTful protocols.
StorageSwiss Take
With the introduction of RING8 and updates to ZENKO, Scality is positioning its solutions to provide organizations with the ability to perform holistic data visibility and orchestration from core to edge. The solution gives organizations the potential to eliminate cloud data silos and to much more easily comply with increasingly complex data governance policies.
George Crump is the Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO, the leader in Ultraconverged Infrastructure. Prior to VergeIO he was Chief Product Strategist at StorONE. Before assuming roles with innovative technology vendors, George spent almost 14 years as the founder and lead analyst at Storage Switzerland. In his spare time, he continues to write blogs on Storage Switzerland to educate IT professionals on all aspects of data center storage. He is the primary contributor to Storage Switzerland and is a heavily sought-after public speaker. With over 30 years of experience designing storage solutions for data centers across the US, he has seen the birth of such technologies as RAID, NAS, SAN, Virtualization, Cloud, and Enterprise Flash. Before founding Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest storage integrators, where he was in charge of technology testing, integration, and product selection.
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