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Struggling Italian ISP Tiscali has called on Scality and its RING product to build a cloud storage service.

The company's Tiscali Cloud Storage offering is said to offer extreme reliability. It is aimed at the SMB market and companies can open an an initial 100GB account for a promotional €15/month, including 50GB of traffic in and out, with no transaction fees. After the first 100GB of data, the service is pay-per-use (per GB/month) though.

Scality CEO Jerome Lecat said Scality RING is the back end platform for Tiscali's customers.

Scality's RING stores objects in a flat space with a distributed object database, and has, Scality claims, virtually unlimited scalability.

The system uses peer-to-peer nodes and is said to be self-healing if a node crashes, hence Tiscali's extreme reliability point. With recent cloud difficulties in mind, such as Amazon, this reliability point could be crucial.

Tiscali was founded by Renato Soru and his visionary management has driven the company, but its business performance has not matched his hopes. The UK operation was sold to Carphone Warehouse in May 2009, and Tiscali was in trouble with its auditors the month before.

Recently it announced that financial 2011 revenues should be 8 per cent higher than the previous year with 15 per cent higher earnings before taxes (EBITDA), and it is involved in an Italian consortium to build a broadband internet infrastructure. Things may be beginning to look up. ®

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