17 My division is Orange Labs: Products & Services. Our expertise comes from 3,300 people in 11 different countries. We define the overall technology strategy for all the products provided to the group like: consumer cloud storage, e-mail, and user directories. Today, our consumer cloud storage platform provides service to three million customers all around the world, in France, some other European countries, and AMEA (Africa, Middle East, Asia). Our e-mail service is about to be migrated to this storage platform as well, so there will be tens of millions of clients by next year. In terms of evolution, three years ago we were at less than five petabytes. We’ll certainly be over 10 petabytes by the end of the year, and we’ll reach well over 20 petabytes in 2016, so there’s very strong growth. When we chose Scality two years ago for its software-defined storage (SDS) solution, it was an obvious decision since the competitors weren’t completely mature. Today Scality is still at the forefront. Scality met our TCO requirements, and allowed us to greatly reduce our cost of cloud storage. In terms of performance requirements, we might have had some doubts or concerns at the very beginning of the project, but Scality definitely delivered so we’re very satisfied. SDS clearly decouples the software layer from the hardware it manages. It has enabled us to use commodity hardware, whether it is low-cost or very high capacity, and to keep the intelligence at the middleware level for data replication, encryption, etc. Another strong point of SDS is its scalability, which is the ability to boost the platform in performance and capacity, all with minimal impact. That is why SDS is the ideal solution for rolling out a huge capacity platform with consistent growth. In just three to five years from now, the volume of data will surge even more. Some new hardware technologies will become generally available such as for example solid-state disks (SSDs). It is most likely some solely SSD-based storage will appear. We’ll be able to benefit from all these new technologies on our platforms through SDS and, thanks to Scality, without any negative impact. That’s really remarkable. Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash
