In Azure, it is the storage to use, and in my view, the Blob Storage offers more, or finer-grained configuration options, than S3. So my recommendation would be to check in detail what is offered. As the Blob Storage is more or less a Microsoft exclusive product, the "interoperability" is more limited than, for example, with S3. The S3 is more widely adopted, and if you cannot exclude a migration scenario from one cloud provider to another, additional effort is needed.
The team in charge of implementing Scality has to be full stack in order to guarantee the correct functioning of the entire system. However, you have to think very carefully about the balance between servers and disks, perhaps adopting smaller fully populated servers instead of large semi-populated servers, which would mean that over time our disk updates will not have a fully useful life.
Blob storage is fairly simple, with several different options/settings that can be configured. The file explorer has enhanced its usability. Some areas could be improved, such as providing more details or stats on how many times a file has been accessed. It is an obvious choice if you're already using Azure/Entra.
As an organization, it took us a while to understand the shift from a traditional black box SAN to software-defined storage, but now we are much more certain of what this means. The time invested and the resources were not very high, thanks on the one hand to the technical support and on the other to the coherence and good development of the platform.
Microsoft has improved its customer service standpoint over the years. The ability to chat with an issue, get a callback, schedule a call or work with an architecture team(for free) is a huge plus. I can get mentorship and guidance on where to go with my environment without pushy sales tactics. This is very refreshing. Typically support can get me to where I need to be on the first contact, which is also nice.
Azure Premium Blob offers better latency than competitors. It works best with the Azure ecosystem, and competitors lack it. Azure Blob even stands out in storage durability, providing up to 16 nines. It can have various use cases that can suit all the organisation's needs. The Azure Blob solution can also be deployed on-premises.
Due to the nature of our business we require extensive encryption and availability for sensitive customer data. The erasure encoding that Scality provides gives us the assurance that documents are rest are never in a state of being downloaded or available to a casual data thief. This is something that can be found with other vendors but at a fraction of the same cost. Having this kind of performance, availability and redundancy at the cost that Scality provides has made a large difference to our organization.
Keeping sensitive customer data secure is a must for our organization and Scality has great features to make this happen.
We replaced a single SAN with a Scality ring and found performance to improve as we store more and more customer data.
Being able to lose various portions of our Scality ring and allow it to continue to service customers while maintaining high performance has been key to our business.
