Sponsor Editorial

Written for architects and engineers who evaluate storage the way they evaluate any critical infrastructure — by understanding how it actually works. Scality ADI is a software-defined platform that presents object (S3) and file (POSIX) data through a single namespace spanning four tiers (Extreme, Hot, Warm, Cold), built for a world where one organization must feed GPU clusters at sub-50-microsecond latency, serve sovereign cloud and backup at scale, and retain petabytes of archive at near-zero power, without operating four separate products.

The paper works top to bottom: the deployment model and software stack; the distributed, inherently immutable storage engine; the flash-backed metadata layer and how it scales to hundreds of billions of objects via RAFT consensus, bucket sharding, and online migration; data protection through replication and Reed-Solomon erasure coding with self-healing; the five-level CORE5 cyber-resilience model; performance at scale (including a 100+ node, three-AZ production-path test sustaining ~420 GB/s read and 250 GB/s write on 10 MB objects); workload tiering and media economics; AICONNECT AI integration (GPUDirect Storage, Kubernetes CSI/COSI); and the Guardian autonomous-operations agent exposed over the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It closes with reference architectures and an honest look at where ADI fits — and where it doesn't.