28 As Scality’s customers incorporate more and more public cloud services into their IT operations, they seem to implement the following three hybrid cloud data management use cases most frequently: Archiving: transitioning on-premises data to cheap cloud storage for long-term archive and data retention. Disaster Recovery: maintaining a copy of on-premises data in the cloud for business continuity. Service Bursting: replicating a subset of on-premises data to the cloud to leverage the flexibility and elasticity of cloud services for compute intensive purposes such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, media rendering/transcoding. Let’s cover each of these use cases in a bit more detail. Hybrid cloud for archiving It is most likely well understood, if not a bit cliché, that we are generating more and more data every day. As the amount of data grows, so too do the rules and regulations governing this data and the amount of time organizations must retain data for. For data that only has to be maintained and does not have to be actively managed, public cloud storage archive pricing and accessibility is an increasingly attractive option for long-term data retention. Hybrid cloud for Disaster Recovery Having a disaster recovery and business continuity plan is crucial for virtually all organizations, but maintaining a secondary datacenter does not always make sense — if it is even an option at all. Replicating on-premises data to the public cloud, coupled with the ability to quickly spin up application components in the cloud in the event of an on-premises failure, gives customers a variety of disaster recovery options that range from immediate failover to longer recovery time objectives for less critical workloads. Additionally, disaster recovery (DR) in the cloud provides the option to have a secondary (or even more) site that is geographically remote from the primary site. Hybrid cloud for service bursting Hyperscale cloud providers (think Amazon, Google, Azure, Alibaba) and their partners offer a wide variety of data analysis, artificial intelligence, and machine learning services. Amazon Web Services currently lists 11 different analytic products while Azure lists nine. In addition to being able to leverage the raw compute power for cloud-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings, customers can push data to the public cloud, leveraging a growing number of data services that would be far too difficult and costly to build and maintain within their own on-premises infrastructure, especially for services that are only needed “on demand” during specific phases of data workflow or business processes. Scality RING for hybrid cloud data management With the release of eXtended Data Management (XDM) features, Scality RING customers can now replicate (copy) and lifecycle transition (move) data between RING and any number of public cloud providers to address these hybrid cloud data management use cases. XDM supports both new and existing data, meaning RING customers can leverage these features for their current environments as long as they are running RING 7.4.4 or later. XDM supports both object and file data formats as well as simultaneous replication to multiple public cloud providers, which can reduce costly network access and egress charges as you avoid having to copy or move data between clouds. Using XDM features with data stored exclusively on RING is always free, enabling use-cases requiring metadata search, lifecycle transition across RINGs, or replicating from one RING to other RINGs. To learn more about the latest version of Scality RING and eXtended Data Management, please visit our RING product page.
