Scality Bridges the Microsoft, Amazon Cloud Storage Divide

Source: sdxcentral.com by Dan Meyer

ORLANDO, Florida – Scality is bridging the storage divide between Amazon S3 cloud storage and Microsoft’s Azure Blob Storage platform with a software-defined storage (SDS) product that allows S3 applications to support the oddly-named storage medium.

The Scality Connect product allows the support without requiring any additional development or rewrites.

Paul Speciale, vice president of product management at Scality, said the product uses native Azure Blob Storage application programming interface (API) calls to map S3 buckets and objects to containers and blobs. This removes the chance for data to be stored in a proprietary format.

Blob storage is also known as object storage, with the former term referring to binary large object storage. The Microsoft version is a service that stores unstructured data in the cloud. It can store text or binary data, such as a document, media file, or application installer. It also uses the “hot,” “cool,” or “archive” tier of storage classes.

Speciale said benefits include one-click deployment; deep S3 API compatibility; scalability of performance, load balancing, and failover due to the stateless architecture; and having data stored in its native container and blob format that allows for direct access from other Azure apps and services.

Once available in a few weeks, customers will be able to download the Scality product through the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, with instances hosted in their Azure account. The product is also available as a stateless service that can be hosted on a virtual machine (VM) within an Azure subscription.

Paul Turner, chief marketing officer at Scality, said this stateless nature is an important part of the product’s differentiation in the growing SDS space.

“It’s a very lightweight, stateless deployment,” Turner said, noting it was similar to running a container on a VM. “You don’t want to capture data or slow down traffic with a database or interference layer.”

The stateless nature also provides for quicker scalability of storage needs, and supports faster failover should any of the nodes fail.

Turner also explained Scality tapped into the open source market in building out the new product. This work was combined with Scality’s past expertise with the S3 interface, which accrued more than 1 million downloads through the Docker market.

Scality was born out of Bizanga, which was acquired by security firm Cloudmark in early 2010. Bizanga’s leadership team went on to form Scality, and have since attracted $92 million in funding from the likes of HP Ventures, Menlo, and Iris Capital.

Object storage has garnered a lot of attention recently, with a number of large vendorspushing into the space. Some have noted the need for such platforms is due to the near dominance of S3 in the SDS space.

“My hope is that down the road there will be Amazon S3 on one side and Minio on the other side,” said Anand Babu Periasamy, co-founder and CEO of Minio, which itself recently launched an SDS platform and highlighted the market push beyond Amazon’s dominance. “I hope to see the early signs of Minio emerging as the S3 alternative and operate outside of the Amazon ecosystem.”