Scality aims to build speed for object storage with Ring XP
Scality's Ring XP utilizes all-flash storage hardware with a stripped-down software-defined storage platform. The service brings fast access times for object storage on-premises.
Scality now offers fast access to on-premises data within object storage, provided those using the service have the appropriate all-flash storage hardware.
They're jumping on the AI bandwagon.
Mary JanderAnalyst, Futuriom
Scality Ring XP, available today with the Ring9 software-defined storage platform, strips away many services related to object storage and focuses on fast access and write times for AI applications and training.
The addition to the Ring platform is a response to Scality customers' AI demands, even if the target audience is small, according to Mary Jander, an analyst at research firm Futuriom.
"They're jumping on the AI bandwagon," Jander said. "They're optimizing what they do for AI workloads."
Stripped for speed
Ring XP is for customers with petabytes of data sitting within object storage that could be useful for AI model training and fine tuning, said Paul Speciale, chief marketing officer at Scality.
The software's performance is optimized for small, kilobyte-sized object data such as text logs or image thumbnails, he said.
Scality is targeting customers that might have considered AWS S3 Express One Zone service for fast object storage access speeds but available in a customer's own data center, Speciale said.
The AWS S3 Express One Zone also targets customers that need high-performance object storage for AI applications and training, with latency delays of 3 to 10 milliseconds compared with the standard S3's 10 to 200 milliseconds.
Speciale said Ring XP should reach microsecond latencies for objects 4 KB or fewer in size.
"These customers need extreme, blazing performance," he said.
The new service strips down S3-like commands to Get, Put and Delete within the API to eliminate potential bottlenecks and can reach performance speeds similar to Vast Data or Pure Storage, according to Speciale.
Ring XP will be built into Ring9.4, the latest version of its software. The platform is priced by total storage capacity under management. Customers will need all-flash NVMe storage servers using AMD's Epyc processors to use Ring XP. Supported servers are available today from Lenovo, Supermicro, Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprises, according to Speciale.
Scality's Ring software typically uses hybrid storage hardware, alternating between flash and hard drives, but Ring XP is aimed at customers looking for a high-performance offering.
Customer demand
Large language models and generative AI might have drawn a majority of the market's attention, but smaller enterprise AI projects are constantly starting up, according to Ray Lucchesi, president and founder of Silverton Consulting.
These smaller projects are typically done on-premises for specific enterprise use cases, a niche storage companies such as Scality are hoping to fill.
"A lot of training is being done in the cloud for large language models, but AI has a lot of different levels of models," Lucchesi said. "For smaller models, that's possible on-premises."
In the future, Lucchesi anticipates an arms race among storage vendors to support a variety of storage formats, speeds and AI projects. Maintaining that speed for larger objects could help Scality stand apart.
"This is quite a step, but it doesn't mean the other object storage vendors couldn't do something similar," Lucchesi said. "They're putting a stake in the ground for that size, but that doesn't mean they couldn't support 32 kilobytes or more."
Speciale said future Ring XP capabilities could support migrations and movement of object data into colder tiered storage or moving object data instead of file using Nvidia GPUDirect, which connects storage media directly to GPUs for processing and frees up server CPUs for other applications.
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for TechTarget Editorial covering cloud and data storage.
