DDN Joins Active Archive Alliance

DataDirect Networks, Inc. took a step in the expansion of its ecosystem for archive solutions by announcing that it is joining the Active Archive Alliance.

This move underscores the focus on delivering data management solutions from high performance primary storage to long-term archive storage.

Rapid data growth is rampant across data intensive industries such as cloud, content distribution, media and entertainment, and HPC. Users expect vendor solutions to offer inter-compatibility as data is migrated across the tiers of storage. The Alliance is the industry association users turn to for leadership and vendor compatibility for long-term data retention solutions.

This collaboration continues its mission of bringing together the technology and leadership from companies innovating to solve customer demands for searchable storage for massive amounts of data.

Built to address the storage needs of data intensive environments, the suite of products supports the entire data lifecycle, providing customers with high levels of performance.

The GRIDScaler parallel file system and NAS appliance provides scalable file storage with policy based lifecycle management capabilities to enable users to migrate data between different storage tiers based on policies.

The WOS object storage platform allows an active archive to scale to billions of objects in a single name space, while providing performance, high access speeds, and user defined data protection options that can cross geographies.

With integration between GRIDScaler and WOS technologies, as well as intercompatibility with active archive alliance application members, the company is redefining the architecture of scale-out storage infrastructures and providing users with data protection, archive, collaboration and distribution capabilities designed to meet the storage requirements of businesses.

DDN WOS and GRIDScaler Technologies Address Active Archive Use Cases
and Provide Collaboration, Access and Tiered Storage Capabilities
An active archive is a method of tiered storage which gives the user access to data across standard POSIX file system interfaces with virtualization in the background to migrate data between multiple storage systems and media types including solid state disk, HDD drives, magnetic tape and optical disk.

Active archives are tailored for companies that regularly manage high-volumes of digital assets or face data growth.

The company’s product line has been developed to meet the demands of massive unstructured data generators. Active archive solutions allow users to tier data from file-based workflows into a scalable archive. This gives users the ability to access all data for DR or enable access to data via a ‘follow the sun’ model, maximizing data protection, organizational productivity and speeding time-to-insight.

Molly Rector, CMO, DDN, said:  “DDN offers tremendous expertise in high performance, scale-out storage solutions. As demand increases among our users to offer multiple storage tiers coupled with the ability to tune performance, access and data protection parameters, we look forward to collaborating with the Active Archive Alliance to define industry requirements and educate end users on best practices. Technology is evolving rapidly; DDN and the Active Archive Alliance are jointly committed to helping users access the best technologies to meet their storage and management requirements.“

Floyd Christofferson, Active Archive Alliance COB, said:  “DDN’s industry view is aligned with the Active Archive Alliance and its members on the key issues affecting long-term storage and data growth. The addition of DDN’s expertise and thought leadership to our end user programs and initiatives will help us accomplish even more in addressing storage, access and preservation issues.“