Scality and Solidigm Reshape Storage Protection in the AI Era
For 15 years, Scality has operated at a scale most enterprises never contemplate. Its customers routinely manage petabytes, tens of petabytes, and now exabytes of unstructured data. My recent conversation with Paul Speciale, chief marketing officer of Scality, alongside Jeniece Wnorowski from Solidigm, revealed how this software-defined storage pioneer is navigating a shift in how organizations think about data protection in an era of ransomware threats and AI workloads.
Shifts in the Data Protection Landscape
The ransomware threat has fundamentally changed the data protection conversation. As Paul noted, you can’t go a day without seeing news of a cyber attack, and this constant barrage has added a new priority for chief information officers: in addition to backup speed, recovery speed is now top of mind. Organizations need their backup systems to serve as insurance policies that can quickly resurrect operations after an incident. This demand requires special architectural considerations and performance characteristics from the backup system.
AI also has introduced additional complexity to the data protection equation. First, the integrity of data feeding AI systems becomes paramount. “Imagine training your AI on data that’s been tampered with or has some kind of integrity constraints,” Paul said, raising the possibility of the potentially catastrophic outcomes. Second, AI itself becomes a tool for both attack and defense. While Scality explores embedding AI capabilities to detect suspicious access patterns and questionable payloads, ransomware actors are simultaneously weaponizing AI for sophisticated phishing attacks and impersonation schemes.
The Flash Storage Tipping Point
The flash storage revolution is reshaping Scality’s deployment patterns in ways that would have seemed unlikely just years ago. Historically, Scality’s massive capacity deployments relied primarily on high-density hard disk drives (HDDs), with flash comprising only 1-2% of total capacity to accelerate metadata operations and data lookups. The converging costs between flash and HDD storage, combined with performance demands from analytics and AI workloads, are driving increased adoption of all-flash configurations.
Paul cited a conversation with a major analyst firm that reinforced this trend: AI models in cloud environments are already training on object storage backed by flash. The same pattern is emerging for on-premises deployments. Even fast backup operations can benefit from all flash storage. “Why? Because again, it’s back to this restore equation,” he explained. “If I have flash, I can do a faster job of restoring.”
Software-Defined Advantage in a Competitive Market
Paul emphasized Scality’s software-only approach as a core differentiator in an increasingly competitive storage market. By remaining hardware agnostic, Scality can leverage best-of-breed components like Solidigm’s high-capacity SSDs while optimizing for specific media characteristics. This flexibility extends to energy efficiency, performance tuning, and media-specific optimizations.
The conversation revealed Scality’s vision toward becoming a data platform, extending their reach beyond storage. “And what is a platform?” he asked. “A platform is something that has a series of services. It might be a search service, a data cleansing service, a vectorial database for AI.” Paul sees software vendors as holding advantages in delivering these integrated service offerings given they are not tied to specific servers or form factors.
Object Storage and the Path Forward
Object storage’s mainstream emergence represents another important industry change. After 15 years of evangelizing object storage’s benefits, Paul sees the market finally recognizing its fundamental advantages for managing unstructured data at scale. Object storage’s inherent scalability, combined with its understanding of metadata and data characteristics, positions it ideally for immutable data protection and AI workloads. The hyperscalers have already validated this approach through Amazon S3 and Azure Blob adoption for AI applications. “The opportunity is huge as an object storage player in that arena,” he said.
The TechArena Take
Scality’s 15-year journey demonstrates the importance of being able to adapt alongside shifting enterprise priorities. Storage solutions must balance performance, resilience, and flexibility to meet the growing demand for data restoration capabilities and to address the changes rising from AI’s dual role as both a workload and security tool. As object storage enters the mainstream and flash economics continue improving, organizations managing massive unstructured data volumes will increasingly depend on software-defined approaches that optimize across media types and deployment models. Scality’s platform vision, rooted in pure software architecture and object storage expertise, positions the company to address these converging demands.
For more information on Scality’s data protection solutions, visit scality.com.
For 15 years, Scality has operated at a scale most enterprises never contemplate. Its customers routinely manage petabytes, tens of petabytes, and now exabytes of unstructured data. My recent conversation with Paul Speciale, chief marketing officer of Scality, alongside Jeniece Wnorowski from Solidigm, revealed how this software-defined storage pioneer is navigating a shift in how organizations think about data protection in an era of ransomware threats and AI workloads.
Shifts in the Data Protection Landscape
The ransomware threat has fundamentally changed the data protection conversation. As Paul noted, you can’t go a day without seeing news of a cyber attack, and this constant barrage has added a new priority for chief information officers: in addition to backup speed, recovery speed is now top of mind. Organizations need their backup systems to serve as insurance policies that can quickly resurrect operations after an incident. This demand requires special architectural considerations and performance characteristics from the backup system.
AI also has introduced additional complexity to the data protection equation. First, the integrity of data feeding AI systems becomes paramount. “Imagine training your AI on data that’s been tampered with or has some kind of integrity constraints,” Paul said, raising the possibility of the potentially catastrophic outcomes. Second, AI itself becomes a tool for both attack and defense. While Scality explores embedding AI capabilities to detect suspicious access patterns and questionable payloads, ransomware actors are simultaneously weaponizing AI for sophisticated phishing attacks and impersonation schemes.
The Flash Storage Tipping Point
The flash storage revolution is reshaping Scality’s deployment patterns in ways that would have seemed unlikely just years ago. Historically, Scality’s massive capacity deployments relied primarily on high-density hard disk drives (HDDs), with flash comprising only 1-2% of total capacity to accelerate metadata operations and data lookups. The converging costs between flash and HDD storage, combined with performance demands from analytics and AI workloads, are driving increased adoption of all-flash configurations.
Paul cited a conversation with a major analyst firm that reinforced this trend: AI models in cloud environments are already training on object storage backed by flash. The same pattern is emerging for on-premises deployments. Even fast backup operations can benefit from all flash storage. “Why? Because again, it’s back to this restore equation,” he explained. “If I have flash, I can do a faster job of restoring.”
Software-Defined Advantage in a Competitive Market
Paul emphasized Scality’s software-only approach as a core differentiator in an increasingly competitive storage market. By remaining hardware agnostic, Scality can leverage best-of-breed components like Solidigm’s high-capacity SSDs while optimizing for specific media characteristics. This flexibility extends to energy efficiency, performance tuning, and media-specific optimizations.
The conversation revealed Scality’s vision toward becoming a data platform, extending their reach beyond storage. “And what is a platform?” he asked. “A platform is something that has a series of services. It might be a search service, a data cleansing service, a vectorial database for AI.” Paul sees software vendors as holding advantages in delivering these integrated service offerings given they are not tied to specific servers or form factors.
Object Storage and the Path Forward
Object storage’s mainstream emergence represents another important industry change. After 15 years of evangelizing object storage’s benefits, Paul sees the market finally recognizing its fundamental advantages for managing unstructured data at scale. Object storage’s inherent scalability, combined with its understanding of metadata and data characteristics, positions it ideally for immutable data protection and AI workloads. The hyperscalers have already validated this approach through Amazon S3 and Azure Blob adoption for AI applications. “The opportunity is huge as an object storage player in that arena,” he said.
The TechArena Take
Scality’s 15-year journey demonstrates the importance of being able to adapt alongside shifting enterprise priorities. Storage solutions must balance performance, resilience, and flexibility to meet the growing demand for data restoration capabilities and to address the changes rising from AI’s dual role as both a workload and security tool. As object storage enters the mainstream and flash economics continue improving, organizations managing massive unstructured data volumes will increasingly depend on software-defined approaches that optimize across media types and deployment models. Scality’s platform vision, rooted in pure software architecture and object storage expertise, positions the company to address these converging demands.
For more information on Scality’s data protection solutions, visit scality.com.
.png)
