Scality gets a jump with VMware Cloud Director integration

Object storage specialist Scality has become the first supplier to gain integration with VMware’s Cloud Director via OSIS (Object Storage Interoperability Service).

VMware Cloud Director provides deployment and management for cloud service providers and the move will allow Scality to get a head start in the market for regional cloud service provision, which it sees as a growing opportunity.

“Customers are often more interested in sovereign cloud, local cloud, because of geo-political turmoil that we see,” said Scality CEO Jerome Lecat. Also, customers often prefer local cloud because they want to deal with humans. And often they don’t use more than 5% of what AWS [Amazon Web Services] offers, technically.”

Suppliers such as Scality can integrate with VMware Cloud Director via OSIS, developed by VMware. It makes products like Scality’s Ring S3 object storage available to VMware customers, such as the cloud providers it will aim at that want to deliver services to their cloud customers.

The integration will allow service provider customers to use it to provision object storage in Ring, to create a bucket, to create policies on a bucket, and so on.

“If you want to be a cloud provider, there are two ways you can do it,” said Lecat. “You can go the DIY route and use OpenStack, but it is very hard, expensive and clunky. Or, you can go with VMware. Sure, you pay the VMware tax, but then you use the framework of VMware Cloud Director and you run your services.”

Lecat said Scality Ring object storage was ideal for cloud providers because of the flexibility it offers in a potentially unpredictable market.

“Cloud providers have no idea what workload they will receive,” said Lecat. “They need to be ready for whatever will be thrown at them and can be inundated with whatever performance spikes will arrive.”

Object storage has been consistently present in IT decision-makers’ buying intentions over the past decade or so, even if it hasn’t set the world on fire. In this year’s TechTarget/Computer Weekly IT Priorities Survey for 2023, for example, about 6% said they planned to deploy object storage.

Object storage is well suited to large-scale storage deployments, for unstructured data and especially for cloud-native applications.

Lecat said Scality Ring could offer 1,000s of IOPS per bucket and hundreds of 1,000s per cluster.

Cloud service providers are an important part of Scality’s customer base, which stands at “about 15% of revenue and growing”, said Lecat.

Targeted use cases that Scality service providers might use Ring for include storage as a service, backup as a service and general storage use cases. Lecat said Scality provides storage for around 400 million email inboxes globally.

Scality has reached version 9 of its Ring object storage product, which runs on relatively inexpensive commodity server hardware. Ring also supports NFS and SMB and provides file access storage.

Scality also has its Artesca platform, which has reached version 2.0 and is somewhat more limited in comparison to Ring object storage. Artesca is Scality’s object storage product that aims at single application use cases and is heavily targeted at data protection.