HP Inks Global Reseller Agreement With Object Storage Startup Scality

Scality, a San Francisco-based object storage startup, said Thursday it has inked a global reseller agreement with Hewlett-Packard that could help HP compete better with EMC and other storage rivals.

Scality and HP have an existing alliance in which Scality's RING storage software is sold with HP's ProLiant SL4540, DL380 and DL360 servers. The vendors have a 50-Petabyte installed base with customers such as Comcast and Time Warner Cable, Erwan Menard, chief operating officer at Scality, said in an interview Wednesday.

Now HP salespeople and channel partners will be incented to sell Scality, which means they'll be able to bring the technology into more deals, Menard said.

Related: HP Set To Dive Deeper Into Object Storage With Cleversafe OEM Agreement

Object storage is good at handling massive, Petabyte-scale amounts of unstructured data -- such as email, video, photo and audio files -- as well as archival data storage.

HP has an object storage product called StoreAll from its acquisition of storage vendor Ibrix in 2009, but that technology isn't as sophisticated as Scality and hasn't been selling well, partners told CRN recently.

Menard wouldn't comment on Ibrix, but said Scality gives HP an important and highly sought after technology that will help it compete with storage rivals.

"Based on what HP teams are telling us in the field, we are equipping them to compete with EMC in deals they could not complete so far," Menard said. Scality's range of use cases includes content and video distribution, and other Web and cloud services, he said.

Scality also sells its software on servers from Dell, Cisco, SuperMicro and others, and its reseller agreement with HP is non-exclusive, said Menard.

Scality has raised around $36 million since its founding in 2010, including a $22 million Series C round last July from Menlo Ventures, Galileo Partners, IDInvest Partners, Omnes Capital, Iris Capital and FSN PME Fund.

PUBLISHED OCT. 16, 2014