DDN Adds Cloud Tiering, NAS and SSD Capabilities

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced a set of parallel file storage product enhancements engineered to accelerate big data and HPC workflows, enable automated data collaboration across the cloud, simplify high-scale systems management, and bridge scale-out storage to support enterprise applications.

"The importance of flexible, efficient and simple infrastructure becomes increasingly critical for enterprises as data becomes essential to organizational success," said Jean-Luc Chatelain, EVP of Strategy and Technology, DDN. "With the new enhancements to our GRIDScaler and EXAScaler family of products, DDN has evolved parallel file storage from being an application point-solution to an enterprise class, easy to manage big data appliance for the capture, storage, processing and global distribution of massive data."

Based on DDN’s Storage Fusion Architecture, DDN’s parallel file storage appliances are engineered with parallel file system technology, including IBM’s GPFS file system (GRIDScaler) and the Lustre open source file system (EXAScaler). New GRIDScaler and EXAScaler offerings include both hardware and software enhancements designed to more tightly integrate with data-intensive applications and workflows while also optimizing storage acquisition and management costs at multiple levels of scale.

"DDN has long been a partner of choice for organizations that need to scale far beyond conventional file system limits," said Mark Peters, a senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "With the unique, innovative and targeted engineering it has invested into its parallel file storage appliance portfolio, DDN continues to reaffirm its position at the vanguard of the scalable systems marketplace, and therefore as one of the storage leaders of the contemporary big data era."

"DDN has been an important strategic partner to Indiana University," said Stephen Simms, Manager of the Indiana University High Performance File Systems group and Data Capacitor Project. "They provide deep expertise in both storage infrastructure and HPC parallel file systems. DDN has put significant effort into creating products are simple to install, manage and scale in order to help reduce the numerous headaches that are associated with HPC storage. We are interested in the new enhancements developed by DDN and the impact they will have in the academic community. Increased performance, better monitoring, and ease of collaboration are all things that we look for in a storage solution."

These enhancements include:

• DirectMon Scale-Out Appliance Monitoring and Management: To eliminate the management complexity of scalable systems infrastructure, DDN DirectMon provides single-pane-of-glass GUI-based systems management for both GRIDScaler and EXAScaler file storage environments.
• Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) Mid-Range and High-End Appliances: EXAScaler and GRIDScaler systems can now be deployed with either DDN’s SFA12K platform (capable of delivering up to 40GB/s and managing up to 1680 flash and spinning disk drives) or the SFA7700 mid-range hybrid flash storage appliance (capable of delivering up to 10GB/s and scalable from 60-324 disks in as little as 4U of data center rack space). Newly-announced SFA7700 carries forward DDN’s heritage of performance and is engineered to deliver performance levels 700% greater than competing scale-out file storage platforms.
• Storage Fusion Xcelerator (SFX) Hybrid flash Storage Caching: DDN’s new SFX flash caching technology accelerates file system data and metadata transactions while cost-effectively marrying the performance of flash technology with the economic benefits of HDD technology.
• Cloud Tiering with WOS cloud Storage and HSM Tools: DDN’s WOS object storage technology — featuring cloud-based data distribution and replication – is now combined with GRIDScaler and EXAScaler, enabling organizations to process data locally at the highest rates of performance and automatically publishing collaborative data sets across a distributed cloud environment. Cloud Tiering is available immediately for GRIDScaler and in 1H 2013 for EXAScaler
• Enterprise NAS Access: For applications that do not require the highest levels of performance access, DDN now offers NAS access via NFS or SMB/CIFS to enable enterprise applications to access a scale-out storage namespace.

These new capabilities from DDN are for a spectrum of organizational scale – configurable for mid-range departmental applications while featuring scalability to support the most scalable applications – with performance over 1TB/s. Optimized applications for new GRIDScaler and EXAScaler platforms include all organizations looking to power big data workflows with simple, scale-out parallel file storage appliances, including big data analytics, bio-informatics, energy exploration, government and academic research, web-scale computing, animation, financial modeling, manufacturing design and government intelligence.