Scality launches ADI platform for enterprise AI data

Scality has launched Autonomous Data Infrastructure, a new data infrastructure platform for enterprise AI, cyber resilience and sovereign data control. It extends the company's storage portfolio into what Scality describes as an operating model for organisations managing data at multi-petabyte to exabyte scale.

The launch builds on Scality's existing RING and ARTESCA products, which remain in the portfolio. ADI adds a broader platform aimed at customers facing growing AI workloads, tighter regulatory demands and rising pressure on data centre power use.

Autonomous Data Infrastructure, or ADI, combines Scality's distributed object storage software with a new autonomous operations engine called Guardian. Guardian is designed to manage tasks such as expansion, system healing, rebalancing, upgrades and lifecycle workflows, while keeping human approval in place for every decision.

That human oversight model is central to the company's pitch to large enterprises, governments and regulated sectors. Guardian surfaces recommendations and operational insights, but leaves control with operators.

The platform is built to span different storage media within a single namespace, including NVMe solid-state drives, hard disk drives, tape and cloud-based cold storage. Policy-based lifecycle management lets customers place workloads on different media based on performance needs, cost and power consumption.

Scality is also positioning the system around AI use cases that have placed new demands on storage infrastructure. It cited training, inference, retrieval-augmented generation, video search and summarisation, and key-value cache workloads for distributed inference as examples of applications requiring different combinations of throughput, latency and governance.

Portfolio shift

Rather than replacing its established products, Scality is using ADI to broaden its portfolio. RING has long served as its platform for large-scale distributed object storage, while ARTESCA has focused on immutable backup storage and cyber resilience.

Both products will remain core offerings. ADI is intended to sit above those foundations as a broader platform for what Scality sees as a new phase in enterprise infrastructure, where AI demands, cyber security requirements and sovereign data policies overlap.

The new platform is delivered as open-code software, with source code available for inspection and governed contributions. That approach is likely to appeal to customers in sensitive environments seeking transparency over infrastructure software and longer-term control over deployments.

Scality has paired that with outcome-based service level agreements covering availability, performance, protection posture, power consumption and operational efficiency. The terms suggest an effort to frame storage procurement less around raw hardware or software features and more around operational results.

AI operations

A notable part of the launch is Guardian's support for external AI tools and automation workflows through MCP-enabled extensibility. That would allow customers to connect their own AI stack to platform operations rather than rely solely on tools supplied by Scality.

Infrastructure efficiency is also a key selling point. The platform provides real-time power telemetry at system, node and workload level, giving operators visibility into how storage decisions affect data centre energy consumption.

For performance-sensitive AI work, ADI supports multi-terabyte-per-second throughput and low-latency access through a new RDMA-accelerated key-value cache connector. At the other end of the data lifecycle, long-term archives can be moved to tape or cloud cold storage to reduce power use.

The cyber security message remains prominent. ADI includes Scality's CORE5 cyber resilience framework to maintain data immutability, recovery and auditability.

Jérôme Lecat, chief executive officer of Scality, set out the company's view of the market shift.

"The AI era hasn't just changed how enterprises use data, it has exposed how badly the old storage model was broken. Scality ADI isn't just a faster object store. It's a new operating model that autonomously aligns the right performance, protection, and economics to every workload, at every stage of the data lifecycle. That's what it takes to keep GPUs productive, satisfy regulators and insurers, and maintain sovereign control, all at the same time, and at exabyte scale. We are not replacing what works. We are building what comes next," said Lecat.

One early customer reference came from Groupama G2S, which has used Scality RING in its private cloud environment since 2021.

"We have relied on Scality RING as a core storage platform of our private cloud since 2021, and it has consistently delivered the scale, resilience, and performance our operations require. Scality ADI and its Guardian autonomous operations represent exactly the evolution we need - AI-enabled infrastructure management that will allow our teams to operate more efficiently while maintaining the security and control standards our business demands," said Manuel Paviotti, manager backup & storage at Groupama G2S.

Industry analyst Simon Robinson of Omdia said the launch addressed a governance gap in the market discussion around autonomous infrastructure.

"Our research underscores that building the right data infrastructure is critical in evolving enterprise AI from PoC to operational scale that meets the realities and responsibilities of complex, modern organisations. Yet, the conversation around autonomous infrastructure has too often defaulted to marketing language without addressing the governance question enterprises care about. Scality ADI takes a more credible approach, with operational intelligence through policy-governed execution, where agents surface recommendations and actions occur within auditable bounds, on an architecture ideally suited to the regulated, sovereign, and mission-critical environments where trust in the platform is as important as its technical performance," said Robinson.

Scality said the platform is available now through its partner network.