Intelligent Data Centres Issue 12 | Page 49

END USER INSIGHT evidence management for UK police forces. This stores digital evidence uploaded by police officers that is managed by an application providing intelligent search, scan, analysis, management and secure sharing of assets. 3. As an S3 compliant scale out storage tier to support telent’s Backup-as-a- Service (BaaS) service offering, enabling us to automatically ‘age’ data out to a longer-term retention tier of storage. What does the launch of RING8 – enhancements to the product enable unique data visibility and control across distributed sites and clouds – mean for telent and its customers? How do customers benefit from the system? The addition of eXtended Data Management (XDM) is of particular interest as it provides data management capabilities across clouds and multiple RINGs. telent’s customers benefit by having access to an object storage tier that is secure, resilient, massively scalable and cost-effective. With the Scality Ring providing resilience across multiple data centres and supporting a multi-tenant environment of cloud services, it provides telent with the ability to design and create new services knowing that the Scality Ring is in place and already providing the benefits mentioned above. What are the main benefits of the system? Being software-defined and therefore decoupled from the hardware, it gives us the flexibility to deploy it on server infrastructure that is right sized for the solution. How long did it take to implement the solution? The implementation of the Scality solution was part of the wider and overall build out of the telent cloud platform. How does the new system integrate with telent’s existing systems? Scality object storage is used in the telent Cloud Platform in a number of ways: 1. As a scale out, cost-effective object tier of storage to support any customer consuming IaaS resources from the telent Cloud Platform. 2. As a scale out, cost-effective tier of storage supporting telent’s digital asset management solution that was primarily developed around digital www.intelligentdatacentres.com Other areas are the resilience it provides. telent’s solutions are used to support national critical services and so to retain data in long-term retention – lifetime retention in some cases – it is essential that telent can rely on the storage platform to deliver. Scalability is also key. As a service provider, telent needed to be able scale the solution in situ, while running, with no impact to services. Couple this with the data retention requirements and petabyte scale becomes very important. How far has the system future- proofed telent? It has given it a platform on which multiple services can rely on in a multi-tenant, service provider world. RING8 provides a number of benefits. Enhanced security and multi-tenant features fit very well in supporting telent’s customers and services so are always welcome. Many of telent’s customers have solutions that are edge-centric when it comes to data creation, so being able to provide data management and governance from Edge to core with a single namespace is an interesting prospect. What trends are you seeing/ expecting to see within the infrastructure space? Hybrid and Edge to core are really hot topics at the moment. Pretty much every customer conversation starts by understanding their approach to all things ‘cloud’. A hybrid model brings with it many benefits and coupled with a data conversation (unstructured) around where it is created, how it is managed, protected and secured should lead directly into a RING8 and XDM conversation. More specifically around infrastructure, with more and more solutions becoming software-defined and therefore decoupled from infrastructure, the underlying infrastructure becomes more of a commodity item. However, the infrastructure layer still needs to provide resilience, ease of management (via industry standard REST API) and be secure as not to undermine the capabilities you layer on top using software-defined applications and solutions. ◊ Issue 12 49