How Do You Build a UI for an Exabyte-Scale Distributed Storage System with Scality

Why It Matters

Effective UI/UX for exabyte‑scale storage reduces operational complexity, cuts costs, and enhances system reliability for enterprises.

Key Takeaways

• Early UI gave excessive manual controls, overwhelming users.
• Dashboards added visibility but created information overload and noise.
• Alert fatigue caused missed critical warnings despite abundant notifications.
• Shift toward AI-driven, declarative UX reduces manual configuration.
• Balancing automation with human oversight ensures trust and effective alerts.

Summary

Scality’s CTO George Reni walks through the evolution of the management interface for an exabyte‑scale distributed storage platform, describing how early customers demanded granular manual controls and how that mindset shaped the first UI.

He outlines four development phases: a control‑heavy UI that let users trigger repairs and balance traffic; a dashboard‑centric stage that flooded operators with per‑disk graphs and metrics; an alert‑overload phase that produced constant notifications and eventual fatigue; and finally a shift toward an AI‑driven, declarative UX that abstracts configuration while still offering guardrails.

Reni cites examples such as customers insisting on manual repair triggers despite automatic healing, a “red sign” that persisted for a year causing complacency, and the new system’s ability to explain its actions and escalate to humans when risk exceeds thresholds.

The lesson for the industry is that massive storage systems require interfaces that prioritize actionable insight over raw data, leverage automation to reduce operator load, and maintain transparent human oversight—an approach that can lower operational costs and improve reliability at scale.

Original Description

Scality CTO Giorgio Regni opened by addressing the complex challenge of managing exabyte-scale distributed storage systems, which involve thousands of drives, intricate networking, and microservices architecture. He recounted Scality's twelve-year journey in UI and UX design, starting with early customers like internet service providers who, coming from traditional SAN environments, demanded extensive control and visibility. This led to an initial design phase characterized by numerous manual controls and detailed dashboards, reflecting a desire to manage every aspect of the system, even when processes like data repair and balancing were automated.

However, this approach soon revealed its limitations. The proliferation of dashboards and alerts led to "dashboard fatigue," where operators became overwhelmed by information and desensitized to notifications, missing critical issues until it was too late. Similarly, providing an excessive number of configuration variables, often requested by customers influenced by systems like Kubernetes, was deemed counterproductive. Regni highlighted that expecting customers to tune intricate distributed system parameters was impractical, as even engineers struggled with such granularity. This era solidified the realization that relying on humans as the primary control plane for such vast systems was inefficient and prone to error.

Scality's new direction, embodied in their ADI design, aims to reinvent system management. It shifts from an imperative "tell the system to do things" model to a declarative one, where users specify desired outcomes, and the system autonomously delivers and monitors them. This modern UX leverages AI and expert agents to continuously observe the system's state, act within defined guardrails, explain its actions, and escalate to human operators only when complex judgment or high risk is involved. The goal is a learning system that minimizes human login frequency, as happier customers are those who implicitly trust the system to manage itself effectively, allowing human intervention to be reserved for truly exceptional circumstances.

Presented by Giorgio Regni, Chief Technical Officer, Scality. Recorded live at AI Field Day 8 in San Jose, California on May 14, 2026. Watch the entire presentation at https://techfieldday.com/appearance/scality-presents-at-ai-field-day-8/or visit https://TechFieldDay.com/event/aifd8/ or https://Scality.com for more information.