112 The digital economy, the Internet of Things, and edge computing are driving an explosion of data. It makes sense to manage this massive amount of content with cloud services that are literally closer to the data itself. Companies are looking to combine the power of these on-premise solutions from public cloud providers with complementary storage solutions, like Azure Stack Hub and Azure Stack Edge. These Azure extensions let enterprises build and run hybrid applications across traditional cloud boundaries. When running applications need petabyte-scale storage (especially in disconnected or air-gapped deployments), Scality gives customers a way to augment Azure’s edge solutions with on-premises, scale-out storage and data orchestration capabilities. While Scality has previously supported Azure Blob Storage as a backend location for hybrid cloud use cases, the storage provider is now able to provide native Azure Blob API-based applications with front-end connectivity to both Scality RING and Scality Zenko. That makes Scality the only storage and data management provider to support both front-end and backend Azure Blob support. “Customer interest in hybrid cloud and edge deployments is increasing, and we see a market need for Azure edge solutions with scale-out storage support,” said Tad Brockway, Corporate Vice-President, Azure Storage, Media, and Edge, Microsoft Corp. “We are glad to see Scality enable their products to support Azure Blob storage for a range of hybrid cloud and edge storage use cases.” Why Scality and Azure Blob There are several use cases for (and verticals that can benefit from) this new support, including: Disconnected or high-latency deployments such as ocean-based platforms or remote survey sites in the energy vertical 100% disconnected architectures such as mobile datacenter in the defense vertical IoT and edge applications that generate and need to process large data sets Industries such as the healthcare vertical that would like to leverage Azure services but sometimes face regulatory hurdles when using public cloud services Private clouds running on-premises Azure services at scale for internal applications Virtually Unlimited Storage Since 2017, Scality Zenko has enabled applications with client-side support of the Amazon S3 API to use Azure Blob Storage as a backend storage location by translating the Amazon S3 API calls into Blob Storage API calls. Now, Scality’s support for Azure enables applications and platforms with client-side support for the Azure Blob Service REST API to use Scality RING as a backend storage location. This new functionality means that Scality RING can provide essentially unlimited storage capacity for Azure edge solutions such as Azure Stack Hub and Azure Stack Edge. Azure Stack Hub and Scality RING are available through leading IT solution providers such as HPE, Cisco, and others. Through our partnership with Azure, Scality is enabling hybrid and private cloud architectures using advanced Azure compute and data services that leverage software-defined storage for petabyte-scale unstructured data. To learn more about Scality’s work with Azure, please visit Scality’s Azure partner page.
