Scality has launched Maestro, a fleet management platform designed to help MSPs and other service providers centrally manage large numbers of ARTESCA object storage deployments as they scale backup-as-a-service operations.
The platform gives providers a single view across customer environments, with centralized software and firmware updates, capacity tracking for usage-based billing, and an out-of-band architecture that avoids the need for VPN connections into each customer site.
Scality Maestro targets service provider complexity
The solution was co-developed with cloud and service provider partners (SCSPs), enabling them to centrally monitor and manage hundreds of object storage deployments with minimal complexity and at scale.
READ MORE: Scality launched a revamped partner program in Jun of this year to better address the needs of providers, resellers, and distributors.
Scality Maestro provides service providers with:
- End-to-end management down to the hardware layer, including ARTESCA software upgrades and server firmware updates.
- Aggregated capacity utilization data across all customer deployments, enabling automated pay-as-you-go billing.
- Out-of-band connectivity architecture that eliminates VPN requirements, as all traffic flows from ARTESCA to Maestro and not the other way.
- Support for enterprises managing ARTESCA across branch offices or distributed edge locations.
“Service providers building BaaS businesses on Scality ARTESCA are managing infrastructure at a scale that demands enterprise-grade operational tooling,” said Thomas Danan, Sr. Product Director, Scality. “Maestro was built with our SCSP partners to solve the real operational problems they face every day with centralized visibility, automated management, and the billing infrastructure to run a sustainable managed service.”
Scality noted that service providers require a single pane of glass to monitor health, push firmware and software updates, and track capacity utilization across all customer sites – all without requiring VPN tunnels into every customer environment.
“The fact that it requires no VPN and no network reconfiguration on the customer side was a hard requirement from day one,” said Danan.
Centralized management supports BaaS operations at scale
Maestro was designed for the SCSP and MSP markets to help deliver backup-as-a-service (BaaS) at scale, but is also well-suited to enterprise organizations running ARTESCA across multiple locations, whether at the edge, in offices, or as part of a distributed data protection architecture.
Scality argues that organizations reach an operational inflection point as deployments grow from a handful of locations to tens or hundreds of sites, at which point single-site management approaches become inefficient.
“We manage multiple Scality ARTESCA deployments across our key customer sites in the UK and Ireland as part of our backup-as-a-service offering, and until Maestro, every one of them was independently managed – separate logins, VPN tunnels, manual update cycles, and monthly capacity reports assembled by hand,” said Dominic McLoughlin, CEO, Autodata.
“Instead, Maestro gives us a single view of the entire fleet. Software updates that consume hours of staff time can now be monitored centrally, and we can grow the fleet without adding operational headcount. We can already foresee a significant difference in running our service,” McLoughlin continued.