The enhancement of an existing relationship between the two companies sees the jointly engineered appliance get a new unified management interface.
Michelle Rockler, Scality’s vice president of strategic alliances
Software-defined storage vendor Scality and HPE have extended their partnership with a new integrated solution. It will take the form of an appliance which brings together Scality RING object storage software, and HPE Apollo 4000 high-density storage servers, and will be available through the HPE channel.
HPE has been reselling Scality since 2014, and the two companies have deepened their relationship significantly over the years.
“HPE has a robust portfolio and a lot of SAN, but we are their scalable object storage offering, and part of their core portfolio,” said Michelle Rockler, Scality’s vice president of strategic alliances.
While HPE partners with many storage vendors through their HPE Complete program, Rockler said that the Scality relationship is a level deeper than that.
“We are part of their mainstream supply chain, which means that HPE can fulfill us globally,” she said. “The HPE Complete program provides for fulfillment only in select countries.”
HPE is not Scality’s only route to market, but it is a major one for the company.
“They are a significant partner to us, and we have strengthened our partnership over time, making increased investments in it,” Rockler said. “We work with HPE as a distributor to reach their channel, rather than work through traditional distribution. While we do have some independent resellers, our go-to-market design point is through technology alliance partners. With HPE, we come together for a best- in-class solution, whether the customer wants it factory installed or put together through a partner.”
The target market for the new integration is enterprises and large enterprises, reflecting Scality’s strength in the high end of the market. They have over 170 petabyte-scale customers around the world.
“Scality is well-known in the service provider space, and that’s about half our business – telcos and hosting partners,” Rockler said. “That’s our roots, and where the company came from. It gives blue chip customers confidence in our technology because Tier One service providers have a very high bar.” Their technology features native file protocols and high fidelity S3 API, data encryption, both volume and bucket data protection, data-restorative versioning, extended location control for data sovereignty, and geo-replication for disaster recovery.
The new integration is an enhancement of a previous offering through HPE.
“What is new here is a new unified management interface,” Rockler said. “We have both made a high level of investment and commitment and established proactive planning in our road maps to bring the solutions closer together.”
The joint solution has an HPE Apollo 4510 Gen10 system, with up to 600TB raw capacity in a 4U enclosure. The new Scality RING7 software provides deeper integration with HPE hardware, facilitating HPE drive health reporting through HPE Smart Array controller cards within the Scality administrator GUI. In turn, an expanded set of NVMe options in the Apollo complements the metadata storage in Scality RING, by giving full nearline capacity of the storage system to the customer’s object data.
The new offering will also be able to take advantage of unified support services from HPE Pointnext , which will be available beginning in December 2017.
