20 Scalability, durability, compatibility, and performance. Data backup administrators face these challenges when deciding how to keep their organization’s data safe, private, and secure. Scality RING is perfectly suited to help you meet these challenges when backing up your data. You want your solution to scale. That means storing large amounts of backup data with a minimal footprint, low electricity consumption, and a low total cost of ownership (TCO). As Scality is 100 percent hardware agnostic, you can mix and match different disk sizes and server models, allowing you to lower your TCO as prices per GB of storage drop over time. You want data durability. As backups are kept for longer periods of time, due to new regulations like GDPR, hardware failure becomes a legitimate concern. Scality’s Supervisor system protects data objects with erasure coding, which allows fast reconstruction with high durability. If, for example, you have 10 million objects managed by the RING, you have a low probability of losing one object every 10 million years. That means long-term backups on the RING are safe. You want compatibility with S3, especially as more software vendors add S3 object interfaces to their solutions. It’s a fast-moving standard, of course, with more than 60 updates of the API. The Scality Supervisor interface shows several layers to deal with this. There’s an authentication layer, a front-end layer that Scality matches with each new AWS S3 release, the metadata layer that helps index objects for fast bucket listings, a connector layer, and the utilization API to generate real-time reports for activities like billing. Finally, you want performance. You want backups to complete within specific windows and fast restoration of the data. Scality RING rebalances data continuously, which means each additional new server will increase overall performance. Let’s look at an example of how the RING interfaces with a back-up solution from Veeam. First, the backup administrator logs into the Veeam server to back up a client workstation to a locally-stored performance tier. Thanks to a new feature in Veeam 10, the same data is sent simultaneously to a Capacity tier stored on the RING via S3. It’s easy to configure Veeam with Scality RING. Veeam Demo from Scality on Vimeo. The administrator logs into the Scality S3 console and creates an S3 user account for Veeam, which generates an access and secret key. They connect to the Scality S3 browser with those keys and create a bucket to store Veeam backups. The admin then logs into Veeam 10 to add the RING as a Capacity Tier under “Backup Repository.” They choose Object Storage, enter the Scality Connector IP, the previously generated credentials, and the bucket created via the Scality S3 browser. The Capacity tier is now configured. Next, the admin defines the Scale-Out Backup Repository using local storage as the Performance tier and the RING as the Capacity tier. That allows for a copy of the backups to be sent to RING immediately, adding redundancy for safety. Short-term backups are stored on local disks while long-term backups are stored on the object storage. To simulate hardware failure, we can change the letter of the drive storing the Performance tier. We’ll see a warning that the copy is no longer available, and the Performance tier will be restored from the Capacity tier. We can monitor system usage of the restoration in the Scality S3 console, and then see that our job has completed successfully. The files are restored. Scality RING helps backup administrators rise to their most pressing challenges with ease, regardless of specific backup platform. The system is scalable, allows for the durability of data, is compatible with S3, and has strong performance.
