DDN WOS to Support Open Compute Server and Storage Platforms

DataDirect Networks, Inc. announced support for DDN’s Web Object Scaler (WOS), its hyperscale object storage solution, on the recently announced Open Compute server and storage platforms in cooperation with the Open Compute Project (OCP).

WOS software enables organizations to build and deploy their own storage clouds across geographically distributed sites that can scale to unprecedented levels, while still being managed as a single entity. Designed for performance, resiliency and capacity scalability, WOS can ingest and distribute over 55 billion objects per day with commodity storage hardware. With a design to support scalability to over an exabyte of global storage capacity and trillions of objects, global data distribution and latency-optimized global access, WOS is built to enable multi-site, global organizations to connect to and collaborate on data without the bottlenecks and overhead associated with traditional file access.

"Historically, there has not been an industry movement around standardizing and driving the adoption of mass-market hyperscale hardware technology," said Jean-Luc Chatelain, EVP of Strategy and Technology, DDN. "With the new OCP storage hardware specification, DDN is able to focus its cloud storage efforts and investments on the software intelligence that drives today’s business and social connection. The Open Compute movement allows us to harness the power of crowd-sourced hardware design and a highly optimized supply chain to drive the best value for our customers."

"The challenges around building web-scale infrastructure are particularly thorny when it comes to designing the storage component, particularly as organizations look to deal efficiently and effectively with storing very large data volumes," said Simon Robinson, research VP at 451 Research. "This is leading to some creative approaches, not only in terms of innovative technology but also in terms of exploring new pathways to market. Alliances between proprietary offerings such as DDN’s WOS and open source initiatives such as the Open Compute Project are one such example, and we’re fascinated to see how this could help create new value in the market."

OCP is a non-profit organization focused on the development of open standards to support massively scalable, efficient, and economical computing infrastructure. They recently held their third OCP summit, at which Chatelain discussed object storage, the peer-voted most popular topic of the workshop.

"It was an exciting inflection point in the DDN story to be chosen to speak to such an engaged collection of scalability specialists about the opportunity presented by hyperscale object storage and the market disruptions which are driving this to become the de facto storage model in web-scale data centers," said Chatelain.

DDN WOS software will be qualifying the OCP storage platform when it becomes available from hardware manufacturers, which is expected to be within the next year.