Scality guarantees 100% availability

Object storage house Scality is offering a 100 per cent data availability guarantee. How so?

It’s for customers using its RING object storage, now in its sixth and S3-focused generation, and involves the use of its HALO Cloud Monitor, along with customer RING installation checking and individual customer pricing.

HALO is a cloud-based service and monitors a RING deployment and provides real-time reports, capacity planing and alerting from a cloud operations centre.

• Standard or base version
• • RING metrics and events,
  • Major issue detection,
  • Capacity planning.
• DCS (Dedicated Care Service) version
• • All RING component metrics and events,
  • Comprehensive system and component (disks +cpu) issue detection,
  • Root cause analysis into detected anomalies,
  • Capacity planning,
  • 100s of metrics and KPIs.

There is predictive alerting - KPI (key performance indicator) triggers - based on trend series and learnt good behaviour across components and systems, with components meaning disks and cpu. There are continuous SLA probes, emulating an end-user and monitoring the user experience.

Scality CMO Paul Turner says the RING system System is already 100 per cent available if you manage it properly: “We have done this with some customers already. Now we’re industrialising it.” And the enabler of this industrialisation aka general availability, is the HALO monitoring system.

Scality has to be involved in the system management as one of the conditions for the 100 per cent availability guarantee. Another is that the customer and Scality check the system, including the hardware, for suitablity.

Turner says that, if the RING fails, a customer will not have to pay the service charge for missed time, which doesn’t, as one TechLive attendee said, sound "that" onerous. Turner’s response was: “The penalties on us are not something we want [and] the brand damage would be horrible if we fail[ed].”

The standard version of HALO is free for supported Scality customers. The DCS or premium version is charged-for on a per-customer basis. There's no fixed price, and larger customers pay an annual fee. ®