Enterprise storage vendors love to talk about exabyte scale, AI readiness, and multi-cloud vision. But as someone who’s spent the better part of 30 years in operations—across SANs, NAS, cloud, and everything in between—I tend to filter that hype through a much simpler lens:
“Will this thing work when it matters?”
Scality presented at Cloud Field Day 23, and what stood out wasn’t just the scale of their deployments—it was the quiet operational sanity behind them. Sure, there was impressive performance and architectural flexibility, but what really caught my attention were five practical takeaways that don’t always make it into press releases or analyst write-ups.
Much of that clarity came from Scality CTO and co-founder Giorgio Regni, who didn’t just walk through architecture slides—he gave us a window into how RING behaves in production, with customers operating at truly massive scale.
Let’s dig into the details.
IT Admins Feel at Home—Because RING Admins Like AWS
I’ve seen my share of S3-compatible storage systems over the years. Most of them focus on API compatibility, but few actually try to feel like AWS when you’re managing them. Scality RING does.
When they say “you can administer RING like AWS,” they mean it. IAM, users, policies, roles—it’s all modeled on the AWS way of thinking. That means if your ops team knows how to manage buckets in AWS, they’re already 80% of the way toward managing a RING deployment. No translation layer required. No re-education. Just clean, intuitive administrative patterns that make sense at scale.
This isn’t an accident. Giorgio specifically emphasized how important this was to their design. Multi-tenancy, usage tracking, and S3-compatible policy enforcement were all baked into the system because, as he put it, “Our customers want to build their customers—internal or external.”
That sounds like cloud, because it is.
CORE5: A Marketing Name Worth Keeping
Scality doesn’t just do object lock, encryption, and erasure coding—they’ve bundled these and other operational guardrails into a framework they call CORE5. I normally roll my eyes at product naming exercises, but this one stuck.
CORE5, as Scality frames it, covers five distinct layers of cyber resilience:
- API-level resilience – S3 Object Lock is enforced at the moment of object creation, ensuring data is immutable and protected from ransomware or accidental deletion.
- Data-level resilience – Fine-grained IAM controls, zero-trust architecture, and AES-256 encryption help prevent unauthorized access or exfiltration—even at scale.
- Storage-level resilience – Distributed erasure coding slices and scatters data across nodes, making it indecipherable to attackers—even if they gain root access.
- Geographic resilience – Multi-site replication ensures data survives regional disasters or breaches without sacrificing availability.
- Architectural resilience – The platform is fundamentally immutable; even with elevated privileges, it resists overwrites and tampering by design.
It’s a checklist that speaks directly to storage and security teams—people who live in the world of audits, recovery points, and “what if” drills.
Giorgio didn’t spend long on branding, but the features behind CORE5 came up repeatedly in his examples—especially immutability, replication, and the ability to absorb drive failures without blinking. In his words: “At least 10 drives fail every day across our customer base. The system doesn’t care. It just heals.”
That’s the kind of design mindset that shows respect for ops teams.
75% Cost Reduction Isn’t Just About Hardware
Cost reduction stories are everywhere, but the 75% figure quoted in the Euro bank deployment wasn’t just about cheap disks or high density. It was the cumulative result of architectural and operational choices:
- Immutable buckets replace complex backup regimes.
- Lifecycle policies eliminate cold data hoarding.
- Disaggregated scaling means you don’t have to oversize any one tier.
That’s the kind of systems thinking I appreciate—not “buy fewer drives,” but “manage data better across its lifespan.” And yes, that includes offloading to tape without your end users ever noticing.
Giorgio added useful context here too: their customers don’t just build for scale—they evolve into it. One bank started with just 1PB and now manages 100PB across six global regions. That’s not a forklift upgrade. That’s operational confidence.
Cold Data Still Matters—Just Don’t Make Ops Pay For It
One of my favorite things about the CNES space agency deployment was that it brought tape back without apology. Scality’s RING integrates with HSM partners (like HP, Atempo, IBM) via an open API called TLP, letting archived data move off to tape while leaving metadata stubs behind in RING.
The result: your apps still talk S3, but your infrastructure quietly shifts that 15-year-old satellite image from spinning disk to tape. The operations team isn’t stuck managing separate namespaces, writing custom scripts, or reverse-engineering archival policies. It’s transparent, policy-driven, and reversible if needed.
Giorgio’s team even replicated AWS’s Glacier-style retrieval behavior—right down to pending status and asynchronous notifications. But unlike Glacier, there’s no egress charge or hidden penalty. It’s your data, on your terms.
This isn’t just “S3-compatible.” It’s cold storage without cognitive overhead.
Reliability, Defined in Ops Terms: 5 Years Between Failures Over 5 Minutes
MTBF numbers are usually abstract, but Scality’s framing was refreshingly direct: across their customer base, the average time between service interruptions lasting more than five minutes is five years.
That’s not just marketing spin. That’s how you measure uptime when you’re responsible for real people using real applications in real-world systems. It’s not about failure-free hardware—it’s about failure-tolerant architecture. RING’s peer-to-peer foundation and automated healing clearly contribute, but more important is that the whole system seems designed to reduce drama, not just increase speed.
As Giorgio put it: “We get one event every five years. That’s the number I care about.”
In an age where we’re constantly told to expect failure and design around it, Scality is saying, “Sure. And also—we’ll try not to wake you up for it.”
Closing Thoughts
It’s easy to get swept up in the big numbers: trillions of objects, exabytes of data, petabytes per day of ingest. But what I took away from Scality’s presentation—especially Giorgio’s portion—is this:
Operational success at scale isn’t just about performance. It’s about predictability.
And that’s something RING seems to deliver—not just to hyperscalers, but to the banks, governments, and researchers quietly building the infrastructure behind the infrastructure.
It might not be sexy. But it works. And that still matters.
To watch all the videos of Scality’s presentations at Cloud Field Day 23, head over to Tech Field Day’s site.
Mike Stanley 