Scality launches Maestro for managed storage fleets

Scality has launched Maestro, a fleet management platform for service providers running multiple ARTESCA object storage deployments. The product is now generally available for providers offering backup-as-a-service.

The launch addresses a specific operational problem for cloud and managed service providers managing object storage systems across many customer locations. As backup-as-a-service expands from small estates to fleets spanning dozens or hundreds of sites, providers face growing workloads in monitoring system health, applying updates, and reconciling capacity use for billing.

Maestro is designed to give operators a central view across those deployments. The platform lets service providers monitor health and alerts across an ARTESCA estate, manage software and server firmware updates, and track capacity consumption across customer environments.

It uses an out-of-band connectivity model in which traffic flows from ARTESCA deployments to Maestro rather than the other way around. That removes the need for virtual private network connections into each customer environment.

That matters for providers that have relied on a patchwork of separate management processes as their estates have grown. In many cases, each deployment has required its own login, update cycle, and reporting process, adding labour costs as the number of sites increases.

Scality developed Maestro with cloud and service provider partners, and it is already in use in live customer deployments. Although the initial target market is service providers and managed service providers, the software can also be used by enterprises running ARTESCA across branch offices, edge sites, or other distributed locations.

Operational shift

The product arrives as storage suppliers and service providers look for ways to simplify management of distributed infrastructure. Backup-as-a-service has become a growing part of the managed services market, but the economics can become difficult if support teams must maintain each site manually and compile usage data by hand.

Aggregated capacity data in Maestro can support automated pay-as-you-go billing. That addresses a common issue in managed storage and backup services, where providers need consistent usage information from many separate deployments to bill customers accurately.

Autodata, which runs Scality ARTESCA deployments across customer sites in the UK and Ireland, described the previous process as fragmented and labour-intensive.

"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. 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," said Dominic McLouglin, Chief Executive Officer, Autodata.

The comments point to a broader issue for service providers trying to increase margins in backup and storage services. Even where hardware and software costs are predictable, operational complexity can erode profitability if each additional customer site requires more staff intervention.

Service provider focus

Scality positioned Maestro as a tool for operators that have outgrown management methods suited to a single location. Organisations often reach a point where tools that work for one deployment no longer work efficiently across tens or hundreds of sites.

The current release, Maestro 1.1, supports ARTESCA deployments running version 4.0.3 or later. The product is available as an on-premises deployment.

Thomas Danan, Senior Product Director at Scality, said the software was shaped around service provider requirements.

"Service providers building BaaS businesses on Scality ARTESCA are managing infrastructure at a scale that demands enterprise-grade operational tooling. Maestro was built with our SCSP partners to solve the real operational problems they face every day with centralised visibility, automated management, and the billing infrastructure to run a sustainable managed service. The fact that it requires no VPN and no network reconfiguration on the customer side was a hard requirement from day one," said Danan.

The launch adds a management layer to Scality's ARTESCA object storage offer at a time when suppliers are trying to make distributed storage easier to operate for both service providers and large enterprises. For customers with estates spread across branch offices or edge locations, the challenge is less about a single storage node than about running many of them consistently.

Maestro supports end-to-end management down to the hardware layer, including ARTESCA software upgrades and server firmware updates, alongside central monitoring and capacity reporting across a fleet.