Case Study: Comcast achieves scalable, resilient storage for 30M+ mailboxes with Scality RING

Powered by the Scality RING, Comcast Serves Over 30 Million Mailboxes with Greater Flexibility and Resilience

Comcast, one of the world’s largest video, Internet and phone providers with more than 30 million mailboxes, needed to add massive email storage capacity while moving to a cloud-driven, stateless and more efficient infrastructure. Faced with billions of objects, multiple petabytes, high‑churn small and large files, geo‑distributed users and the complexity of a multi‑tier SAN/HSM environment, Comcast had been evaluating new approaches and tested Scality before choosing Scality RING to support its email transformation.

Scality implemented the Scality RING (with a Zimbra 8 connector) across hundreds of standard x86 servers to provide a single-tier, hardware‑agnostic object store with elastic scaling and self‑healing resilience. The solution simplified operations (mailbox moves via metadata only), improved durability and performance, and delivered measurable cost savings — using erasure coding (14,4) to reduce storage overhead to ~29% versus ~200% for triple replication — while lowering price‑per‑gigabyte and price‑per‑IOPS for Comcast.

Comcast

Andrei Gasheyev

Internet Services Architect