Case Study: SURFsara achieves reliable, zero‑downtime, highly scalable SURFdrive for 25,000 users with Scality RING

Scality RING Drives Scientific Collaboration for 25,000 SURFdrive Users

SURFsara’s SURFdrive provides secure cloud storage to students, faculty and researchers across Dutch universities and research organizations, but its original Gluster-based backend began failing to meet growing demand: rebalancing caused multi-day outages as the service scaled to tens of thousands of users. To find a more scalable, reliable and high-performance solution, SURFsara evaluated options and selected Scality’s RING software-defined storage after testing it against IBM SpectrumScale.

SURFsara migrated SURFdrive to Scality RING (with SOFS/SFUSED connectors), completing the move in a couple of months; Scality delivered noticeably higher performance, non-disruptive upgrades and the ability to scale in small increments across datacenters. The result is strong, measurable impact: SURFdrive now serves ~25,000 users with very high satisfaction, operates with an SLA of four nines availability, typically has only 5–10 open tickets at any time, and has significantly reduced operational overhead while enabling future multi-datacenter expansion.

SURFsara

Ron Trompert

Group Leader for Online Data Services