On April 27, 2021, Scality announced a new product named ARTESCA together with HPE during an online live event with Tech Field Day. Scality is known for their RING object storage technology that has been helping businesses for the last decade. With the new ARTESCA announcement, Scality will open their client base to a magnitude of new business opportunities like object storage on the edge, as well as smaller businesses in need of object storage solutions.
Let’s have a closer look at what was recently announced. For the next 6 months, this will be a solution that is only sold together with HPE. But, don’t let that fool you; this is a software-only solution that will run on any x86 based solution (for now, ARM will probably follow ASAP).
Object Storage is More than Large Capacity
Object storage, in its nature, was developed with unstructured data in mind. Simply put, unstructured means datasets that aren’t stored in a structured database like images, audio-video, sensor data, and much more. The issue with this kind of data is that it will only grow, and with that, the need for object storage solutions is, and will be, huge.
Amazon’s S3 storage protocol has been developed for cloud architect scale, and therefore, most object storage solutions are offered with a minimum of 100’s of TBs and are mostly deployed in environments that need Petabytes (PB) instead of Terabytes. With Cloud-Native applications moving more into the edge as well as on-premises data centers, there also grew the need to have smaller object stores as well.
Scality Software Solution: ARTESCA
Smaller organizations are looking at unstructured data solutions as well because of the changing application and data landscape. The problem with large capacity object stores is that it doesn’t make sense in these smaller organizations. Smaller environments might be smaller companies that are still in need of an object store, but for large enterprises, the edge is a great use case for this as well. The ARTESCA Scality solution broke away from the technology that required a customer to have an enormous object storage solution and provides a software solution that is capable of providing small object stores that can be put in edge and data center environments.
Scality to Smaller and Faster
A multitude of companies are rearchitecting business-critical applications to operate under a hybrid cloud model, running either on-premises, in the cloud, or both. A lot of organizations are struggling with the sheer size of the object storage solution from a capacity perspective. Another known issue with object storage solutions was that they are more focused on capacity than performance. With ARTESCA, Scality provides a solution that tackles both capacity and performance.
The Architecture
I mentioned before that Scality has been in the object storage industry for a decade with their RING solution. This is a huge benefit when the customer is demanding solutions for use cases that with your “normal” solution are not in scope. ARTESCA builds upon the experience Scality has with Object storage for the use cases asked by their clients, such as:
- Cloud-Native: A fully containerized solution built on the Kubernetes market standard, that supports multiple Kubernetes distros as well as bare-metal environments.
- Software-Defined: The solution is built with a software-only mindset, and as such, it is future-proof, breaks the siloed thinking, and is available for x86 but should be able to run on ARM technology in the near future as well.
- Cloud-Ready: This is a hybrid cloud solution that enables customers to be multi-cloud ready. The ability to use the software to have a global namespace with a federated cloud data management solution provides the ability to not have to put all of your eggs into one basket.
- Scalability: The solution is able to start with a single node and can scale out to as much as needed.
- Application-Driven: This solution is API-driven from top to bottom, which enables its customers to tweak the solution to something that really fits their needs with S3 API, Prometheus API, IAM APIs, and more.
- Performance: This solution is built with flexibility and efficiency in mind, and with this, performance is key as well. The ability to build on standard server technology, All-Flash to HDD, only enables all performance setups that a company might need.
- Data Protection: There are multiple data protection technologies built into this solution like async replication to a remote instance (RING, cloud) Erasure Coding (Distributed and Dual-layer) as well as local repair codes on single-server deployments.
Conclusion
Scality is well known as a reliable and capable object storage solution provider. With the ARTESCA offering, they enter a large market segment that enables organizations of almost all sizes to start utilizing object storage at an affordable price point and applicable to multiple use cases in an organization, like edge and data center.
The cloud-native nature, as well as the scalability of this product, provides capabilities to DevOps-driven organizations that need object storage-based solutions that provide performance, protection, and flexibility.
ARTESCA is built as a software-defined solution with the cloud in mind on Kubernetes technology and provides the ability to start with a single node but scales out both in performance and capacity. The manageability of ARTESCA is API-driven and provides an easy-to-use interface from which application owners and DevOps employees can easily monitor and manage the business-critical data.
With ARTESCA, Scality (together with HPE at the start) opens up the doors of object storage to organizations in need of object storage solutions to re-architect their applications for the cloud-native world. With ARTESCA, Scality provides the customer added value with the ability of data mobility, application portability and thus leverages the cloud opportunities to their fullest, both on-premises and in the Cloud(s).
