Scality given $10m funds from partner HPE. Plans to polish RING

As noted before, HPE and Scality have formally announced a partnership, with, according to a source close to the companies, HPE making a $10m investment in Scality.

This enhanced relationship on the October 2014 announcement, when Hewlett Packard began packaging Scality RING software with its Apollo 4000 and ProLiant servers.

The $10m equity investment in Scality, we understand, came from HPE Ventures and was in addition to Scality’s August 2014 $45m D-round funding.

Manish Goel, HPE’s storage GM and SVP, said: “The enterprise storage market is diverging into latency-optimised and capacity-driven segments. As the leader in enterprise and hyperscale servers, and the fastest growing vendor in all-flash storage with HPE 3PAR StoreServ, this Scality partnership gives us a leadership position in capacity-driven storage as well.”

HPE says that, “As enterprises and service providers explore ways to tap into the Internet of Things, storage solutions are required which are capable of bridging the gap between traditional file-based applications and new object-access paradigms. These shifts also require a new style of compute infrastructure with traditional rack solutions giving way to ultra-dense compute notes capable of storing more data in less physical space.”

The firm's marketers added: “The unique Scality RING architecture paired with the hyperscale HPE Apollo 4510 and HPE Apollo 4200 provides a future-proof solution for petabyte-scale object applications.”

Scality CEO Jerome Lecat’s canned quote declared: “Emerging application requirements are driving storage and compute closer together, forcing legacy stand-alone storage providers and those without a server footprint to re-examine their strategies. HPE has chosen to invest in Scality … for those exact reasons. Our stronger relationship with HPE will allow us to continue to improve the RING, to better package it with the industry leading HPE Apollo 4510 and HPE Apollo 4200, and create a one-stop solution for the enterprise.”

Scality and HP’s teams will collaborate on expanding go-to-market capabilities with new sales resources, marketing investment and solution engineering including:

• Joint engineering development
• Dedicated marketing programs
• Sales coverage with Server and Storage
• Dedicated Scality pre-sales resources
• Value-based Enterprise pricing

Comment

We face the prospect of IBM/Cleversafe, HPE-Scality and NetApp-StorageGRID selling object storage into the enterprise. Dell has a reselling deal with Scality also, but it is buying EMC and so gaining Atmos and Nile. HGST has Amplidata. Hitachi DataSystems has its object offering. Perhaps this year enterprises will understand file system limitations in the scale-out area for unstructured data better, and look more favourably on object storage technology. ®