Object storage suppliers: We want your big data

Scality

Startup Scality has built its own erasure code-based technology for its Ring-based object storage offering. CEO Jerome Lecat said at SNW Europe that one copy of data is unencoded: "We build chunks up by bringing several pieces of data together. It's different from CleverSafe; we're not trying to encrypt data."

RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent Nodes) technology is coming out this month – November – with Lecat positioning it as an alternative to replication for large sets of data. He wanted to preserve read speed, so tier 2 storage could be RAIN-protected, and tier 1 could be traditional RAID. With this scheme reading on tier 2 is almost as fast as on the first tier, although tier 2 can't support the same number of IOPS as tier 1.

Scality now has has 25 customers, and, we understand, is pleased to have just won a technical trial against Atmos with a potential customer.

The product to beat

In general Atmos is the object storage product to beat. It has become the perceived market leader with the others positioned differently. Scality has its distinctive Ring technology; DataDirect is breaking out from a solid HPC position; and Caringo, the startup started up by the Centera technology founders, is using its Dell-given credibility to build its momentum.

Speed, space-efficient data protection and scale are the three main themes of object storage technology development, and all the suppliers are hoping that the general pressure of rising unstructured data volumes – "Bring it on," you can hear them say – will expose the imitations of file-system approaches and open the door to general market adoption of object storage. ®