As the corporate venture capital (CVC) arm of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the Pathfinder team’s focus is to invest in companies that align with our corporate objectives. As part of the Pathfinder portfolio, each of the companies is aligned to a venture innovation model to help drive business engagement and facilitate value-added solution creation when appropriate. One of these models is to partner with a company to create comprehensive solutions that expand an ecosystem. Over time companies may overlap with other models and be leveraged for other strategic uses.
HPE and Scality had a partnership history before the Pathfinder investment in 2016. Scality provides a software-defined object storage platform providing petabyte (PB) level storage of unstructured data. Scality RING is designed to be always on and provides extreme data reliability, with up to 14 nines (9s)¹ of data durability and storage efficiency using both replication and erasure coding, across single or multiple sites. Object (S3/REST) and file (NFS/SMB) interface support allow easy integration with standard and custom applications, simplifying the creation of extended solutions and creating synergy between Scality, HPE, and additional third-party applications as needed.
HPE supplies storage servers with high capacity and density, with Scality layering a dense, software-defined, high-capacity storage foundation on HPE platforms. The combination of HPE and Scality offers a direct way to grow the HPE storage server ecosystem allowing customers to manage PB levels of storage economically while providing massive scalability, high efficiency, reliability, and secure data access. The Irish Prison Service (IPS) provides an example of HPE and Scality collaborating to solve a customers’ problem.
The IPS manages the daily operation of prisons in the Republic of Ireland. They needed to upgrade their storage infrastructure to allow greater scalability with more efficient data management of video data to reliably preserve high-definition surveillance video for incident investigation. The combination of HPE and Scality was compelling as it offered an end-to-end solution to provide large scalable storage with improved data management, security, and reliability. Ultimately, IPS opted to implement the HPE and Scality solution.
The solution included HPE Apollo 4200 systems providing 300 TB of usable and secure storage, as well as Scality managing replication of data in the event of a disaster. Scality also offered intelligent data management throughout the lifecycle of the stored video data and provided easier administration than the previous solution.
The winning combination of HPE and Scality also provides a storage foundation that encourages indirect ecosystem development. This occurs as channel partners create market-specific or higher-level solutions.
An example of this is Lake Solutions, a leading cloud service provider in Switzerland. Lake Solutions created a backup-as-a-service solution based on HPE Apollo 4000 servers combined with Scality. Additionally, Lake Solutions leveraged HPE GreenLake to provide additional flexibility and agility in their customer offering, while providing on-premises control and compliance. The combination of HPE Apollo 4000 systems and Scality RING, delivered via HPE GreenLake, provides a durable platform that allows Lake Solutions to provide an elastic and secure backup-as-a-service offering. From an investment perspective, this solution demonstrated how an investment can not only provide entry into new markets but also be leveraged to enhance new strategic directions. For further information, read the complete case study.
HPE has also used Scality’s capabilities internally. HPE customer support has been using a traditional file system for years as a data source for troubleshooting and resolving issues. However, due to the PBs of data acquired through telemetry from tens of thousands of HPE storage systems, the team realized they would need additional capabilities to maintain service quality given the ever-increasing amounts of data.
After months of evaluation, the HPE infrastructure and operations engineering team decided to create an intelligent data lake based on Scality RING object storage and HPE Apollo 4000 systems. When fully in production, the system will provide over 10 PB of usable storage with up to 14 nines of data durability and assured uptime. By enriching the telemetry data with metadata through the Scality eXtended Data Management (XDM) toolset, HPE’s customer support personnel can locate data easier and faster than ever. This further improves the customer experience. For more information, read the complete case study.
The investment in Scality has allowed HPE to provide extended solutions to customers, entry into developing markets, enhanced internal operations, and participate and contribute into a new strategic direction with HPE GreenLake. With both companies developing their product road maps, the impact of this investment will only increase over time.
¹scality.com/use-cases/backup-target/.