98 A couple of weeks ago, Scality and Dell announced they combined engineering efforts to offer the Dell SD7000-S. This brand new Dell system was specifically designed for the Scality RING software – S stands for Scality – and is an ideal solution for large-scale file and object storage environments as deployed by the largest digital businesses. The press release and product data sheet provide a lot of details on the joint Scality-Dell solution, but what does this announcement really mean for the Dell-Scality partnership and – more importantly – for the customers? The announcement confirms the longevity of the partnership As pointed out by several industry analysts and journalists, the joint Scality-Dell solutions, enabled by a substantial engineering investment on the Dell side, demonstrates that Dell continues to see a lot of value in its partnership with Scality. The EMC acquisition Dell is working on has not changed Dell’s interest in Scality’s software. The success with customers is real; the momentum is there. The joint solution lays the foundation for a plug & play solution Many Scality customers choose the Scality software-defined storage because they no longer wish to be locked into a storage system from one specific vendor. Maintenance and migration costs have made legacy storage systems less desirable, especially at scale. But acquiring storage software and hardware from separate vendors has made some customers reluctant as well: what about support and integration? The joint Scality-Dell solution offers the best of both worlds: customers get a fully integrated solution, they are not locked into a specific hardware platform and a future pre-installed version of the RING will provide a plug & play storage solution, making it even more easy to deploy and scale the RING. In addition to this, customers benefit from having a single source for acquisition, deployment and support. The SD7000-S is the highest-density storage box; the RING the most scalable SDS What’s making this announcement even more exciting – and appealing for web-scale customers – is the fact that the SD7000-S is currently the highest density object storage system on the market. As the Scality RING is the most scalable software-defined storage solution, the joint SD7000-S and Scality RING solution provides the highest capacity and highest number of objects per box and per rack. The combined scalability and density characteristics make the Scality-Dell product extremely attractive for customers looking to build multi-PB active archives, origin infrastructures or storage clouds. Dell & Scality enable cloud economics The storage industry has been an arena for some very fierce price battles. Pricing used to be dictated by large system vendors, but these days are gone. Today, Amazon, Google and Microsoft define storage pricing. While the public cloud is definitely not a solution for most storage use cases, it has become a storage TCO standard. CFO’s expect their CIO’s to run internal infrastructures as cost-efficiently as it would be when using public cloud storage. The combined Scality & Dell solution enables just that: the Scality RING brings substantial savings on RAW capacity needs (less hardware) and storage management and the SD7000-S saves on datacenter power, cooling and rack space. Conclusion Driven by customer demand, Scality and Dell have joined forces to build a joint solution that enables customers to design scale-out storage infrastructures with cloud economics. This is not only a confirmation of the strong OEM partnership, but it also brings direct benefits to customers. Scality RING on the Dell SD7000-S enables plug & play as an integrated system, while preserving the flexibility of software and hardware separation, a truly unique offering on the market. Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash
