Telenet Customer of Scality Ring Since 6 Years

Scality, Inc. announced a milestone with long-time customer Telenet, the media and telecommunication service provider in Belgium, and the first company to deploy its software-defined storage platform, the RING, which, as of June 2016, is in Version 6.0.

After more than five years of rapid business growth in which Telenet scaled to 25 times its initial capacity, the company reported it has experienced 100% reliability and zero downtime since deployment.

As with most major telecom players in the world, Telenet was tasked with transforming its primarily hardware infrastructure into a digital business. Over a period of five years the company added Internet and broadband services, interactive digital television and fixed and mobile voice services, along with email messaging services. After a few years of providing email, a key driver for a new storage approach was the competitive need to offer larger capacity mailboxes (up to 5GB). The RING enabled the company to adopt new hardware that would support its growth while its data remained protected and available. Scality customers can select the optimal hardware for their business at deployment, and over time, without hardware lock-in, without hardware certification, and without the cost and risk of data migration.

“The RING gives us enormous scale and reduces the risk associated with storage growth,” said Bart Provoost, manager, network applications and services, Telenet. “As our business has transformed and our user base has grown, our need for storage capacity has increased exponentially. However, scaling up hasn’t required any maintenance windows or any downtime. Because we use the RING, our data is protected by the RING software and completely unconstrained by hardware, so it has been a simple matter of adding and removing servers. We have faced zero risk of interrupting or impairing service, and our customer satisfaction has never once been compromised.“

The RING can seamlessly scale storage to match business growth. Since deploying the RING in 2010, Telenet has scaled from 144TB to more than 2.7PB, has used 5 generations of servers, and has run as many as three generations of servers simultaneously in one RING system.

The RING is agnostic which means it can run on any hardware utilizing standard x86. Scality currently has partnerships or reference architectures with major hardware manufacturer, including Cisco Systems, Inc., Dell, Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Seagate Technology plc et Super Micro Computer, Inc. Customers also have the ability to mix and match different server vendors and hardware generations.

“It is fitting, and a great testament to the reliability of the Scality RING, that our very first customer has experienced zero downtime since deployment. The RING’s shared-nothing, distributed architecture, geographical data protection, and self-healing enables 100% reliability with minimal intervention, the benefits of which include carrier-grade service levels and improved end customer satisfaction,” said Erwan Menard, president and COO, Scality. “Furthermore, the RING’s ability to allow customers to choose their hardware reduces acquisition and operating costs, increases deployment flexibility, and enables cloud economics. And now, with the newly released RING Version 6, we’ve added the ability to enable enterprise production deployments of S3-based applications.“