Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Scality turned up the heat on their software-defined storage (SDS) relationship with HPE picking up an exclusive six-month contract to host Scality’s new Artesca lightweight cloud-native object storage platform. 

Artesca takes aim at challenges enterprise DevOps teams face in long-term data retention across multi-cloud architectures and at the edge. The Kubernetes-based software features built-in metadata search, data management, and workflows across private and public clouds. 

And because it is fully integrated with HPE’s all-flash and hybrid intelligent data storage servers, the new offering creates a complete convergence of hardware and software for primary storage of cloud-native apps in the data center, at the edge, and in public cloud, Artesca Chief Product Officer Paul Speciale said.

“This is a perfect best of breed service for cloud-native." Speciale said. “We are betting on object storage, and what that means in practical terms is that we will not do what we did with Ring, which was to also support a file interface. Artesca will not [support files]. It's a pretty big decision and it's a decision also made for simplicity because we think that file systems are generally complex and heavy.”

Ring is Scality's flagship scale-out object and file storage software that it launched in 2010.

Scality's Artesca software offers an application-centric view of data management to balance the needs of operators that control data protection and mobility of the entire application stack with those of developers that focus on core application logic.

To create frictionless access to data with a holistic view of all the data on a continuous basis, Speciale said organizations need to employ an industrialized approach to storage to support many users, tools, and steps to lower the risk for data engineers, data operations, and data scientists who all need access to the same data and tools they prefer, all in one control plane for the full team.

“Containerized applications want to talk to storage differently, they want API-driven access,” Speciale explained. 

As the cloud craze continues, organizations are increasingly interested in leveraging container-based applications to accelerate digital transformation, Speciale said. However, legacy storage performance falls short on delivering insights from emerging workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that typically have very low latency and high I/O throughput requirements.

These new workloads are driving new architectures, and businesses can’t expect to compete in this new data-driven era using old tools developed for an earlier time. Furthermore, the shift to more remote work has exacerbated the need for better visibility and management.

“For about two or three years now we're seeing workloads that we’ve never seen before,” Speciale said. 

Object storage has garnered a lot of attention recently with a number of large vendors pushing into the space. Some have noted the need for such platforms is due to the near dominance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Cloud Storage (S3) in the SDS space. Object storage employs the S3 API, so it speaks the language of the cloud. It also incorporates data management features that simplify data placement, cloud and on-prem storage become two parts of a single global namespace.

Scality was founded in France in 2009, and is now headquartered in San Francisco. Customers include major companies in just about every vertical, including Comcast, Rackspace, Orange, KDDI, DMM.com, Telstra, Bloomberg Media, Dailymotion, Lancaster General Health (Penn Medicine), and Banque Natixis.