Scality has launched an ARTESCA hardware appliance specifically for Veeam users that competes with the Object First product.
The company introduced its cloud-native ARTESCA object storage software a couple of years ago. It supports S3 and multi-tenancy, has dual-layer erasure coding and a global namespace, and can integrate with Veeam, Splunk, Vertica, and WekaIO via S3, provisioning data services to them. Existing Scality RING or cloud data can be imported into ARTESCA’s namespace. The ARTESCA software received a 250 percent capacity increase, hardened security, and Veeam v12 integration in May this year.
Scality CRO Peter Brennan claimed: “The ARTESCA hardware appliance gives Veeam customers an unbreakable backup and recovery solution that can withstand any threat. Adding a hardware option to virtual and software appliance options also empowers our partners to deploy the most secure immutable storage offering while keeping the customer’s preference front and center.”
Larissa Crandall, Veeam VP of global channel and alliances, added: “The new ARTESCA hardware appliance provides our joint customers with secure immutable storage in an easy-to-deploy solution, further strengthening their ability to bounce forward from a cybersecurity incident.”
Scality provides RING enterprise-class object storage, with file support, and lighter-weight, object-only, containerized ARTESCA software. This is currently available as a VMware OVA (Open Virtual Appliance) or in software-only form. Revenues for ARTESCA grew 350 percent year-on-year in the third 2023 quarter.
The hardware appliance is pre-loaded and configured for Veeam Backup & Repication and Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. It is available in three sizes (single to three-node configurations) ranging from 2RU x 96 TB raw, through 2RU x 216 TB raw and 8RU x 648 TB in storage capacity. The 2RU variants have dual NVMe SSD service drives while the 8RU system has six.
It is built, optimized, and tested by a systems integrator and sold through certified distribution and VAR channels. The software features:
- Improved multi-factor authentication
- Limited user privilege rights and increased root access protections with the introduction of a new ARTESCA-OS user profile
- Hardened Linux with Rocky Linux 8, compliant with CIS (Center for Internet Security) policy Level 2
- Tightened protections for installation with a pre-configured ARTESCA OS to reduce the number of required updates
Object First
The original Veeam co-founders, Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov, started Object First in June last year, with a storage hardware and software product providing a primary S3-compatible, object storage target to store Veeam backups.
Object First’s product comes in a 2RU enclosure with two options – 96 TB capacity with 10 x 12 TB x 7,200 rpm SAS hard disk drives, eight for data and two for parity in a RAID-6 scheme. This can support the loss of two drives. There is a hot spare drive in the chassis. A 128 TB version has 10 x 16 TB x 7,200 rpm SAS disk drives and the same RAID-6 scheme with two spindles set aside for parity plus an extra hot spare drive. The disk drives are front-ended by a 1.6TB NVMe SSD in both cases.
It’s pretty clear that the ARTESCA hardware appliance is Scality’s response to Object First, with the same disk drive + NVMe SSD scheme, starting at the same 96 TB capacity point but scaling much higher than Object First’s 128 TB limit.
The ARTESCA appliance will be available in the US by the end of November 2023, and in other regions in January 2024. A Scality blog provides background to this news.
