Organisations across industries need “always-on” business continuity and disaster protection to get the most from their enterprise and service provider cloud deployments, while also maintaining the lowest possible total cost of ownership. To address these needs, Scality has strengthened its scale-out file system (SOFS) and streamlined management and monitoring of its RING8 file and object storage system.

This release delivers significant operational improvements for production deployments at petabyte scale. It provides geo-distributed solutions for the most performance intensive file-based application workloads and simplifies tasks for storage administrators with “point-and-click” functionality.

With these RING8 updates, other benefits include:

• Business continuance and disaster protection: Enterprise customers have large-scale, file-based application workloads for big data analytics, backup/data protection and healthcare medical imaging (PACS/VNA) that demand maximum system and data availability, thereby requiring geo-distributed solutions. Enhancing its already powerful geo-distributed file system capabilities, RING now gives these customers the high-availability business continuance and disaster protection needed for these massive file workloads.
• Detailed utilisation metrics for billing and chargeback: This release offers newly-enhanced utilisation monitoring and reporting for performance (ops/sec, bandwidth) and capacity metrics for multi-tenant deployments. Service providers and enterprises that deploy RING to provide cloud services now have access to consumption-based metrics and reporting for detailed billing/chargeback capabilities. 
• Improved speed and ease of use: For administrators, this release further simplifies common NFS and SMB volume provisioning, shared ACLs management and monitoring tasks through automation and UI-driven actions. New support for the popular open-source Prometheus system monitoring tool and API is introduced. These capabilities save time and further reduce operational costs associated with managing large-scale data storage.

Paul Speciale, chief product officer, Scality, said: “Given the rapid growth of data and the rising costs of storing and managing data at petabyte-scale and beyond, Scality has invested significantly in further simplifying and reducing the operating costs of RING. We offer the only integrated scale-out file system in an object storage solution, and we will continue to innovate to meet our customers’ changing needs at a price they can afford.”