back to article Scality guarantees 100% availability

Object storage house Scality is offering a 100 per cent data availability guarantee. How so? It’s for customers using its RING object storage, now in its sixth and S3-focused generation, and involves the use of its HALO Cloud Monitor, along with customer RING installation checking and individual customer pricing. HALO is a …

  1. DNTP

    I know what they want to imply by "100 %"

    But my brain is telling me "One significant figure? Better put a +/-5% range of error on that."

    This isn't a criticism of the company, I'm sure they are professionals doing their best, but if I saw a number like that in a vendor bid the voices in my head my numeric OCD would ask exactly how many zeros worth of uptime availability really were promised after the first digit.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I know what they want to imply by "100 %"

      I think you will find that is a number from the marketing wonks an has nothing to do with reality.

      1. Adam 52 Silver badge

        Re: I know what they want to imply by "100 %"

        Would one not have expected a journalist to have probed the veracity of the claim before putting it in a headline?

        1. jpaulturner

          Re: I know what they want to imply by "100 %"

          Responding for Scality - This is achievable. Traditional storage architectures for sure cannot achieve this. However, since scality (and others) are distributed storage systems and automatically rebalance data across the cluster after failure, you automatically avoid failure points. The system can be configured with many protection copies for durability using distributed erasure coding - this means that you can protect at any one time ffrom many disk and server failures. The 3rd element which then makes 100% possible is that you need to be monitoring the system and fixing dead disks/servers which may have gone wrong. This is what HALO then brings to the picture. With a system designed for any failure scenario and continuous monitoring then 100% availability is definitely achieveable.

          Learn more about the scality ring architecture here http://storage.scality.com/white-paper-scality-technical-wp.html

          1. Adam 52 Silver badge

            Re: I know what they want to imply by "100 %"

            Consider any number of planet ending scenarios. Would your architecture survive? No. Then you're not 100%, just lots of nines.

          2. This post has been deleted by its author

          3. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I know what they want to imply by "100 %"

            Hello Mr Marketing! =)

            Of course traditional storage architectures can achieve a 100% guarantee by imposing some strict requirements exactly as Scality is doing.

            In fact, I bet this is just a copy of some of the other vendors who have guaranteed 100% through the years, so please don't claim that they were not able to achieve it, since that means that neither are you.

          4. Bad Hombre

            Re: I know what they want to imply by "100 %"

            The weak link of most Object Storage is the database of object mappings and locations. How does Scality provide 100% avaliabily of that? (Sorry I tried to download the whitepaper and got "This site can’t be reached"). Thx.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Terminator

    Cloud-based anomaly detection service

    If HALO is a cloud-based service and monitors a RING deployment in the 'cloud', what happens when the cloud service falls over?

    1. Daniel Binsfeld

      Re: Cloud-based anomaly detection service

      Short answer: nothing :)

      To achieve 100% availability, we need to be proactive (by definition). The service can continue running even if we are without eyes on the glass for a short period of time. That being said, our monitoring platform is using multiple failure/availability zones to provide an excellent level of reliability.

      Indeed, It's been an interesting day for the cloud services today. The RING on the other side kept running...

  3. batfastad

    Sex Panther.

    So it's 100% available... if you make it 100% available.

    That's almost as good as "60% of the time, it works every time" (see title).

  4. hfhghg6767

    Hello Mr Marketing! =)

    Of course traditional storage architectures can achieve a 100% guarantee by imposing some strict requirements exactly as Scality is doing.

    In fact, I bet this is just a copy of some of the other vendors who have guaranteed 100% through the years, so please don't claim that they were not able to achieve it, since that means that neither are you.

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