Scality

Lore & Background

Scality was founded in 2009 by Jérôme Lecat, Giorgio Regni, Daniel Binsfeld, Serge Dugas, and Brad King. The company raised $7 million in venture capital in March 2011, followed by a $22 million C-round in June 2013 led by Menlo Ventures and Iris Capital. A $45 million Series D round was announced in August 2015, and in 2016 Hewlett Packard Enterprise made a strategic investment. In April 2018, the company announced a $60 million funding round. Scality announced a distribution agreement with Hewlett-Packard in October 2014, and added Dell and Cisco Systems as resellers in 2015.

The first version of RING was released in 2010. The platform uses a multitiered architecture and a keyspace calculated at install, logically spread across node servers. A supervisor service provides systems management and monitoring. RING employs erasure coding with variable data and parity stripes, storing object data in container files on an underlying file system. Version 4.2 in October 2013 added native file access protocols including NFS, SMB, AFP, and FTP. Version 4.3 in July 2014 improved performance and added replication options. Version 5.0 in March 2015 simplified installation and expanded Windows support. Version 6.0 was introduced in 2016. RING 7.0 launched in June 2017 with enhanced security and multi-cloud capabilities. RING 8.0 in December 2019 added a new NFS connector with NFSv4 support and KMIP for KMS. RING 8.5 in September 2021 became a Long Term Support version. RING 9.0 was released in April 2022, and RING 9.5 in July 2025 became an LTS version supporting RHEL/Rocky Linux 8 and 9.

In 2017, Scality released Zenko, an open-source multi-cloud data controller, and in 2018 a commercially supported version. Zenko CloudServer (formerly Scality S3 Server) is an open-source object storage server written in Node.js, running in a Docker container with an Apache 2.0 license. Zenko Orbit is a cloud-based portal for data placement and global metadata search. In April 2021, Scality launched ARTESCA, an S3 object storage solution for modern applications with a UI and RESTful API. ARTESCA 2.0, released in May 2023, added ransomware protection features including object locking and sharding, and integrates with Veeam Backup and Replication.

Reader's Guide

Scality's significance lies in its development of software-defined storage that bridges on-premises and cloud environments. The RING platform's ability to scale to exabytes under a single namespace, supporting both object (Amazon S3 API) and file system (NFS, SMB) protocols, made it a notable player in enterprise storage. The company's open-source contributions, particularly Zenko and the S3 Server, provided tools for multi-cloud data management and S3 compatibility outside of Amazon Web Services. The release of ARTESCA in 2021 addressed the needs of edge and DevOps users with a simplified interface and cyber-resilience features. Scality's partnerships with Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Cisco Systems expanded its reach through reseller channels. The company's funding history, including investments from Menlo Ventures and HPE, supported its growth from a startup to a global provider with offices in multiple countries and employees across 14 nations. The RING software's version history, with Long Term Support releases like 8.5 and 9.5, indicates a commitment to sustained enterprise deployment. The introduction of erasure coding, native file protocols, and ransomware protection features reflects evolving storage requirements in the industry.

Did You Know?

• Scality was founded in 2009 by five co-founders including Jérôme Lecat and Giorgio Regni.
• The RING software can scale to exabytes under a single namespace accessible via S3 API and NFS/SMB protocols.
• Zenko CloudServer is an open-source S3-compatible object storage server written in Node.js and distributed under an Apache 2.0 license.