Scality APIs connect Azure Stack to Ring object storage on-site

Scality has extended its on-premise connectivity to cloud storage providers’ edge products with the addition of Azure Blob APIs that will allow customers to connect Microsoft Azure cloud edge deployments to Ring storage.

This comes in addition to the existing S3 connection that allows Scality Ring to act as local storage for AWS edge products and services.

The key use case is to allow Scality Ring object storage to act as bulk storage for data generated by customers that use Azure Stack, AWS Outpost and Google Anthos edge compute services and products.

Scality is addressing the projected continued rise of edge data creation, processing and storage. IDC says there are likely to be 39 connected billion devices by 2021, connected to 39,000 core clouds.

But in particular Scality’s edge APIs to cloud provider’s environments address use cases where edge data is held locally, without necessarily being migrated to a public cloud, or at least not immediately.

These include, said vice-president for cloud business development Wally MacDermid, cases where latency could be prohibitively high such as in remote petrochemical sites, where there is a designed air gap between a remote site and its core such as in military deployments, and where there are regulatory requirements to retain data on-site. “Some edge use cases have sizeable storage requirements,” he said. “Azure Stack Hub can go to 1PB, for example, while its Edge hardware can store 10s of TB.”

With the APIs customers using Azure edge devices and services will be able to connect directly to Scality Ring storage and use it as a local data store. He also cited likely use in Azure Stack data protection, which is not currently “very sophisticated”.

According to MacDermid, Scality is the only storage supplier so far with an Azure Blob API connector. He admitted there is a limited market for these solutions, but that customers for such services are also likely to be storing high volumes of data.

“It’s probably not a volume play. We are looking at dozens of deal rather than hundreds, and in the range from 2PB to 200PB.”

Scality Ring on-premise object storage is already able to connect to S3-compliant devices and there are connected to file services via SMB, NFS etc.

According to MacDermid, future use cases will likely include those where data collected in edge devices needs staging before rapid migration and processing. An example of this would be in the case of commercial aircraft engine data that could be analysed during brief periods on the ground by a core datacentre, with maintenance actions potentially resulting.

Scality is object storage, which is very well suited to large amounts of unstructured data as is likely to be found in edge device data gathering scenarios.

It stores objects with unique identities in a flat structure, as opposed to network-attached storage (NAS), which keeps data in a tree-like file system structure and can run into performance issues when stored data runs into very large amounts of files.

Zenko is Scality’s hybrid cloud storage platform, which allows data access between on-premise and public cloud locations.