Background
Scality is a company with the wind at its back. Chief Marketing Officer Paul Speciale recently told me that the company outgrew the overall storage market in 2022, increasing its business by about 20% year-on-year. A surprising amount of that business, nearly 40%, was from public sector business, while another 40% was from enterprise buyers.
Scality is a two-product company, with each product delivering slightly different value to the enterprise storage market. Don’t let the simplicity of Scality’s portfolio fool you; the company provides an astonishing amount of capability in its offerings – capabilities to which the market is responding.
Scality’s flagship product, RING, is a software-defined unified file and object storage solution. Scality RING, now in its ninth generation, is designed to handle petabytes of data across various storage tiers. Its RING architecture employs a distributed object storage model, enabling seamless scalability and high availability, delivering this on commodity hardware. RING provides a cost-effective solution for organizations seeking to optimize their storage infrastructure.
ARTESCA, on the other hand, is designed from the ground up as a simple-to-manage and secure object storage solution for cloud-native applications. Launched in the spring of 2021, ARTESCA provides high-performance enterprise S3 object storage with some of the strongest cyber-resilience and data protection features in the space. Scality’s recent ARTESCA 2.0 release focuses heavily on bringing new cybersecurity features to its customers.
News: ARTESCA 2.0
Cybersecurity is a top-level concern for enterprise IT organizations, nearly all facing constant battles with persistent attackers. Downtime for a business-critical system directly affects the ability of an enterprise to compete, with a direct impact on the bottom line. According to Veeam’s 2023 Ransomware Trends Report, 45% of attacks over the past year directly impacted production data.
Attackers constantly evolve their attack strategies, attempting to infect systems long before alerting their targets. That same Veeam report highlights that over 93% of ransomware attacks attempt to infect backups, limiting the victim’s ability to recover successfully.
The new ARTESCA 2.0 release helps mitigate such attacks. The release introduces new features designed to harden the attack surface for environments using object storage as a backup target. Beyond cyber-resilience features, the release adds to its list of enterprise-grade features, including additional deployment options.
Multi-Level Cyber-Resiliency
Scality’s ARTESCA 2.0 release is built on a new security-hardened Linux kernel which precludes root access. The new operating environment should dramatically reduce exposure to the critical vulnerability exposures (CVEs) that constantly plague Linux environments. This alone reduces a wide range of potential malicious attacks.
The new release brings comprehensive support for Veeam Data Platform Direct-to-Object and Smart Object Storage API, with new IAM policies for secure Veeam Data Platform access to ARTESCA. This enables data immutability and other operational efficiencies.
ARTESCA 2.0 adds multi-factor authentication (MFA) for secure logins. It also enables new capabilities for the automated deployment of network firewall rules. These new features supplement ARTESCA’s secure endpoint termination, 256-bit AES data encryption-at-rest, and S3 immutable object locking capabilities, providing robust integrated protection features.
New Enterprise Features
ARTESCA was built for simple management, so Scality’s new simplified installer is a welcome addition. The new installer enables fast installations and quicker time-to-service for Veeam backups and restores, widening the protection window.
Keeping with the simplicity theme, Scality brings new deployment options to ARTESCA. The company is making the software available as a VMware virtual appliance, delivering it in the popular OVA format.
The new release also increases the amount of data that ARTESCA can protect. Scality has increased the capacity of ARTESCA by 250% from prior releases, bringing the total to 5PB of usable capacity.
The software remains affordable. ARTESCA software subscriptions start at under $4,000/year for 50 TB usable capacity. This includes all features and capabilities, along with around-the-clock support.
Analysis
Scality has carved a nice niche in the software-defined file and object space. The company has focused on establishing the right strategic partnerships and integrations with major cloud providers, allowing customers to extend their storage infrastructure into the cloud seamlessly. This integration with leading cloud platforms enhances data mobility and enables efficient data management across hybrid environments.
Scality has gained recognition in the industry for its ability to cater to the needs of diverse sectors, including media and entertainment, healthcare, finance, and more. The company continues to demonstrate impressive growth in an increasingly crowded market. Scality competes well against peers such as MinIO and Cloudian. That’s no small feat.
Scality enables organizations to overcome the complexities associated with managing large-scale data. The new features released in ARTESCA 2.0 demonstrates that Scality continues to play a pivotal role in the storage landscape, empowering enterprises to navigate the data-driven era with a little more safety and security.
