118: GreyBeards talks cloud-native object storage with Greg DiFraia, Scality and Stephen Bacon, HPE

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Keith and I have talked with Stephen Bacon, Senior Director, Big Data Category, HPE, before (not on our podcast) but not Greg DiFraia, GM Americas, Scality. Both were very knowledgeable about how containerization is changing IT and the role of object storage in this transition. Scality’s ARTESCA, takes this changed world view to its logical conclusion, with a new, light-weight, cloud-native object storage system for Kubernetes (K8s) that is optimized to store and manage data, edge to core to cloud.

This is a significant joint Scality-HPE solution that has been a long time coming. As evidence of the level of the partnership between the two, ARTESCA will be exclusive to HPE for the next six months. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

We started our discussion on where the new IT world is going. It’s more of an application centric view, that spans multiple distinct infrastructure environments. New applications that live in this new IT world consume lots of data and more often than not, that data resides on object storage. And just like the developers are creating K8s container apps so they can scale easily, any object storage those apps access , needs similar scalability.

This means that edge solutions like smart cars, smart drones, smart sensors, etc. are doing some serious work. Some smart cars are producing a TB of data a day, all of which needs to be analyzed to adjust safe driving algorithms or to re-train AI/ML/DL neural networks.

Moreover, edge apps today are increasingly deploying embedded AI/ML/DL inferencing. That means the days of frozen/archived data are going away. With embedded AI, there’s an ongoing need to re-train on new (and old) data which requires all data to be readily (and speedily) accessible.

Scality has always been strong in high performance, multi-PB environments that needed rock-solid reliability and availability. And over time, they expanded their solution to access cloud data storage resources as well. But ARTESCA goes after a new market entirely. with a light weight, edge to core to cloud deployable object store, that can run anywhere, start small and grow as large as needed.

ARTESCA, Scality’s new cloud native object storage solution comes as a full stack, distributed collection of container based micro-services that runs on K8s. This includes not only object storage services but also a data management control plane.

The management control plane allows for the ingestion and use of any S3 compatible storage to hold ARSTECA data. But it also includes workflow actions that supply automated data movement between locations, data synchronization between sites and other services used to deploy, coordinate, and manage an edge, core and cloud solution as a single object storage environment.

ARSTECA runs on a number of different HPE hardware platforms from scale-out 1U servers optimized for server density, good compute-storage performance for general purpose workloads to a cluster in a box, 2U 4 server solutions that can provide huge amounts of compute-storage horsepower in a small form-factor environment. 

Stephen Bacon,  Senior Director, Big Data Category, HPE,

Stephen leads the Big Data Category, a rapidly growing multi-hundred million dollar business within HPE Storage comprised of the Apollo 4000 family of intelligent data storage servers, data analytics solutions, and the Complete Program of software partner-based solutions including with Cohesity, Commvault, Qumulo, Scality, and Veeam.

His responsibilities span Product Management, Engineering Program Management, Integration Engineering, Partner Go-To-Market, and Partner Operations.

Stephen has held a variety of worldwide, Asia Pacific and Japan region, and New Zealand country roles spanning software, servers, storage, and partnerships in his more than 20 year IT industry career.

Greg DiFraia, GM Americas, Scality

Greg has been working in the Enterprise IT Solutions Market for over 20 years and brings a unique blend of technical and business leadership to the team at Scality.

Before joining Scality, Greg was VP of Strategic Alliances at Turbonomic, a hybrid cloud workload automation developer. There, he had a front-row seat to see the emerging challenges of multi-cloud; experience that has huge value in today’s multi-cloud world.

Having spent the 13 years prior to that with EMC/Dell EMC as Global Sales leader for Object Storage, Director of Sales Strategy for Mid Market business, and, most recently, CTO, Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), Greg led the global sales strategy for the ECS software-defined storage platform.

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