116 The downside of using some cloud storage services like Amazon S3 is getting the data out. That concern is about cost—usually—but recently, it became about access. Period. Reports that Amazon S3 was “unresponsive” started pouring in on the last day of February, 2017. Issues with a US East region instance lasted for hours. While there were no reports of data loss as of this writing, data access was impacted. Loss, even if temporary, impacts business. This may—should—prompt data managers to take a hard look at their “best practices”, and where they put their critical data. Always Available We work hard to ensure that the Scality RING object and cloud storage software keeps data intact and available. Always. In fact, this Amazon service disruption occurred on the same day that Scality announced our new Scality HALO Cloud Monitor. With it, we put teeth into our promise of availability, adding a 100% availability guarantee. Scality HALO monitors the storage environment in real time, so it provides insight: diagnostics, metrics, and even alarms. It sees changes and raises flags so that you won’t lose data or access to it. Scality HALO The visibility that Scality HALO provides is new. The data availability that Scality’s object and cloud storage brings is not new. The Scality RING is software that turns any standard x86 servers into web-scale storage. With the RING, you can store any amount of data, of any type, with incredible efficiency and 100% reliability, guaranteed—all while reducing costs by as much as 90% over legacy systems. Early reports on the Amazon outage say that the problems were caused by a server outage. We’ve got that covered. Scality RING’s shared-nothing distributed architecture means no single point of failure. If a server or disk goes down, no problem. We have customers who’ve been using the RING for years with zero downtime through hardware failures, upgrades, patches, and expansions. Build your cloud on a reliable platform. Scality RING. Photo by Aleksandar Cvetanovic on Unsplash