18 At SURFsara, more than 25,000 academics across 50 science-focused institutions are riding the software-defined object storage wave. SURF, a collaborative IT organization for education and research, uses Scality RING as its storage back-end to its SURFdrive private cloud storage service within its SURFsara High Performance Computing division. SURFdrive delivers secure, reliable, and continually available storage to higher education institutions across the region. The system shreds, relying on software-defined Scality RING to protect, share, and synchronize files within the vast subscription-based cloud. But don’t take my word for it. This is what Big Kahuna Ron Trompert, PhD, group leader for online data services at SURFsara said: “We recently completed a Scality upgrade while in full operation. Nobody noticed anything. Knowing that we have reliable, performant, highly-available storage for the long haul that will effortlessly scale along with SURFdrive subscribership means the team spends its time enhancing our service, rather than merely maintaining the system.” Originally built on “free” RedHat® GlusterFS, SURFdrive was immobilized by intolerable, days-long episodes of downtime as that legacy system ineffectively struggled to serve subscribers while rebalancing data. They realized that free wasn’t always free. Trompert’s team explored all the alternatives: “During our selection process, we were in touch with colleagues abroad. We asked what they used—we didn’t want to risk choosing another bad solution.” Scality RING kept surfacing and ultimately wiped out IBM Spectrum Scale™ as the ultimate replacement solution to best deliver on SURFsara’s aggressive zero-downtime prerequisites and scalability requirements. SURFsara’s effortless success riding the object storage big wave underpins the value of Scality RING for private cloud environments that support collaborative research and that demand boundless scalability, easy upgrades with zero downtime, and low operations overhead. Now that’s a perfect 10. Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash
