“We deliver web-scale storage that powers digital business”: Scality

“Our software-defined storage turns industry-standard x86 servers into an unlimited storage pool for any type of data –file and object - at petabyte scale.”

Scality is the leader in software-defined storage at petabyte-scale. Founded in 2009, the company has deployed software storage solutions that deliver billions of files to more than five hundred million users daily with 100% availability. Its customers include the world’s largest enterprises, particularly in media, telecommunications, and cloud. Scality’s internal motto is: “work hard, play hard, eat well and amaze the customer!”

Headquartered in San Francisco, the company’s employees number approximately 200  worldwide. Scality excels at serving the specific storage needs of Global 2000 Enterprise, Media and Entertainment, Government and Cloud Provider customers while delivering up to 90% reduction in TCO versus legacy storage. Its petabyte-scale software-defined storage is hardware-agnostic, and serves a variety of customers for workloads ranging from backup target, email storage, active and long-term archives, compliance archives, content distribution, scale-out object storage and more.

In discussion with the dexterous personalities: Jérôme Lecat (CEO) and Giorgio Regni (CTO)

Why was the company set up? How did you select the vertical and decide to be a part of the global platform?

In 2008, we were seeing a problem – our customers were under pressure from the massive volume growth of data. Instead of immediately jumping to defining a product, we instead sat down with leading internet operators around the world to understand their challenges and define the product based on their requirements. The fruits of this cooperation became “Bizanga Store” later to become the Scality RING, software-based storage platform. This deep customer-first approach remains a keystone of how Scality operates today.

Tell us about your first product that was launched?

The first production implementation of the Scality RING was in 2010. Telenet went live in July 2010, on 40TB of email for 2 million users (which at the time looked big). Scality software-based RING storage delivers billions of files to five hundred million users daily with 100% availability. The RING makes standard x86 servers scale to hundreds of petabytes and billions of objects. The RING’s end-to-end parallel architecture provides unsurpassed performance, while its patented object storage core increases availability and durability and dramatically reduces operational costs.

If you have to list five factors that have been/are the biggest asset to your organization, what would they be and why?

• Our people: They are the cornerstone of our company - without them we’re nothing.
• Customer first: No matter what happens, the customer is always our top priority.
• Innovation and Creativity: We’re a product company and product companies that don’t innovate and evolve just won’t survive. We have a special research team here in San Francisco who is always looking at the next big thing – wait until you see our new data platform…
• Always do what’s right: It’s important to always take the high ground and do what is right always - be ethical and be proud of it.
• Work hard and play hard: We’re a startup and people come here for the excitement. We expect people to work hard but also want people to enjoy it and have fun.

How do you and your company contribute to the global IT platform?

Object Storage is one of the fastest growing segments of the Enterprise Storage Market. Scality’s RING delivers petabyte-scale software-defined storage designed to use industry-standard hardware and characterized by cost-effective scaling, performance, and auto-recovery. We allow customers to deploy both performance-optimized and capacity-optimized storage, varied data durability levels, and small to large object and file support in a single global namespace.

What do you feel sets your company apart in how you attract top talent?

Ask our team members, customers and partners to describe our culture and you’ll hear words such as engagement, commitment, passion, global/international, strong taste for, technology disruptors, a certain “rock n’ roll” spirit, and camaraderie. Culture is so important to us that we created the position of a “Culture Captain”, i.e. an executive position dedicated to the company culture. And beyond all the concrete actions and projects our Culture Captain Claire Forest rolls out, what matters most is that she keeps us honest: She is the guardian of our culture, with total freedom of speech. At Scality we are convinced that if we build a strong culture our dreams will come true.

Crux about the hotshots 

JérômeLecat (CEO) is a serial entrepreneur and business angel with 20 years of internet infrastructure start-up experience. From 2003 to 2010, Jerome led Bizanga, the leading email MTA for service providers, which he founded with Olivier Lemarié, Marc Sheldon and Giorgio Regni. Bizanga achieved major market penetration worldwide and was successfully sold to Cloudmark in February 2010. In 2001, Jerome became Chairman of the Board of Data Center Technology (DCT), a Belgium based start-up which developed a unique Content Addressable Storage (CAS) technology, especially for the backup market. After signing over 70 customers, DCT was sold to Veritas in 2005 with significant profit for its investors. In 1994, together with Olivier Dauchot and Olivier Lemarié, Jérôme founded Internet-Way, an ISP focused on the enterprise market. As CEO, he built the company from a garage start-up to the second largest ISP in France. In 1997, after the company had reached profitability, he sold the company to UUNET, where he served as Vice President of Products for EMEA.

Jérôme holds an engineering degree from the Ecole Nationale des Ponts at Chaussées, and a research master’s degree in Cognitive Science from Université Paris VII. Jérôme attended the AMD program at INSEAD.

Giorgio Regni (CTO) is a co-founder and CTO at Scality and oversees the company’s development, research, and product management. He is a recognized expert in distributed infrastructure software at web scale, and has authored multiple US patents for distributed systems. Prior to Scality, Giorgio holds an engineering degree in computer science from INSA (Institute National des Sciences Appliquées) in Toulouse, France. He is also an accomplished hacker and developer.

“Our focus is always on making technology better for the operators and end users.”