Dailymotion bets on Scality for storing petabytes of video data

Disclosure: BPIFrance paid for my hotel and airfare to France. Jérôme Lecat was one of the instigators of the trip. Our coverage remains objective.

Software-defined storage company Scality has signed a big deal with video site Dailymotion, VentureBeat has learned.

DailyMotion will be using Scality’s Ring for Cloud storage system.

The deal involves “petabytes” of data, according to Scality chief Jérôme Lecat, who let me know about the news while I was visiting Paris last week.

It’s a nice validation of Scality’s capability to handle large amounts of media data.

Scality says that its cloud storage system provides “scale-out storage, with true 5 9s [99.999%] availability, full scalability for data growth, efficient data protection, and flexible pay as you consume pricing.” It notes that “several industries, including email service providers, media and entertainment, HPC, and enterprise use Scality for cloud-storage systems and services.”

Comcast is a Scality customer (although Comcast uses it for its own email messaging product, not for streaming video), as is Time Warner Cable. Adding DailyMotion is a good indication that Scality is finding some headway among media companies.

“Signing a deal that is pure video is a real milestone for us,” Lecat told me.

DailyMotion is, by most accounts, the Internet’s No. 2 video site after YouTube. It attracts 300 million unique viewers each month on its own site and in videos embedded on other sites; Comscore counts 130 million uniques per month on the DailyMotion web site. In all, the company delivers 3 billion videos to viewers each month. Videos come from DailyMotion users as well as from more than 50,000 content partners, including Warner Music, the NFL, the NBA, Deutsche Welle, and many others.

With volumes like that, a storage solution needs to be both high-capacity (to store the videos) and quick to respond to large numbers of concurrent users. Latency must also be low in order to deliver video streams without glitches or lagging frames.

DailyMotion is not replacing its entire storage system with Scality — rather, it has just begun to implement the Ring storage system after completing extensive testing.

Financial terms of the deal were not available. Scality expects the contract will last for several years at least, as no customer to date — according to Lecat — has deployed the software and then later removed its data from the Scality system.

Both companies are based in France but have significant overseas components. Scality has dual headquarters in San Francisco and in Paris, while DailyMotion is based in Paris but has its mobile technology team in Palo Alto, Calif., and its content development team in New York.

Scality raised $22 million in a third round of funding in July 2013, which Menlo Ventures led. The company, launched in 2009, has raised $35 million to date and employs about 85 people.