15 A global banking and financial services company headquartered in Europe is planning to deploy a Scality RING petabyte-scale store for global Enterprise Cloud services. Historically the bank has used traditional storage within silos of infrastructure to support mission-critical applications. But due to growing data sets and the need to keep several copies of data in different sites, those traditional storage solutions no longer meet the bank’s requirements: Most applications require high I/O performance: add in the replication I/O requirements for cross-site protection, and the storage systems themselves became a bottleneck, leading to a never-ending upgrade cycle. Each upgrade/new storage purchase required data to be migrated from old storage to new, further increasing I/O performance requirements during data migration. Another concern was the risk of data loss during long rebuilds. As disk devices go from 3TB to 4TB to 6TB, the time it takes to rebuild disk failures in RAID arrays lengthens considerably. Scality’s software-defined storage solution has demonstrated the ability to tackle the shortcomings of traditional storage. A key advantage of the Scality RING is its ability to use spare resources to recover from hardware failures and to easily upgrade existing servers, storage and networking hardware—in place—to scale performance or capacity. As a result, upgrading old storage, server and networking hardware with new components can be very simple, fast and cost effective. The bank plans to leverage the benefits of Scality’s intelligent data protection: they will use Scality’s ARC erasure coding, which will increase data durability, and have two independent Scality RINGs at two separate sites with replication between the two. Each RING will actively serve I/O for local applications and replicate data to the other RING. Even if an entire site goes down, the bank will still have access to all their data. Another benefit of implementing the Scality RING is that it is probably the last data migration that the Bank will ever need. The RING can scale-out to support Exabyte storage environments with trillions of objects that all use commodity server hardware and storage. Once data has been moved to Scality, that data can stay there for the foreseeable future so long as system hardware is judiciously added and upgraded online—all without service disruption.
