Storage vendor Scality announced today a new take on storage networking, and it is a bit of déjà vu all over again. The company’s Ring Organic Storage software can leverage any disk storage media, including directly-attached disks, SANs, and solid state drives, but combines the storage nodes in a clever way. The result is that the system is parallel, resilient, self-healing, adaptive, location aware and constantly renewing.
The company claims a collection of 100 nodes can deliver hundreds of thousands of objects per second, with latencies below 40ms at a cost of less than a buck a gigabyte. The idea is to leverage cheaper commodity SATA disk drives but attach them to inexpensive computers to handle the parallel processing. Unlike many SANs, the individual disks can be different brands or technologies, making it easier to updgrade the entire collection.
The system has been installed for several months at a Belgian cable company (video link here) who has upgraded their storage collection several times since their initial use of Ring.
