DDN Enhanced WOS Object Storage Platform

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced enhancements to its WOS object storage platform that include increased data protection and multi-site connectivity options.

With its newest capabilities, WOS provides low data protection overhead. It also delivers control for local-only rebuilds for higher uptime and lower performance impact of hardware failures, along with multi-site collaboration, distribution and DR that is faster and more efficient than public cloud solutions.

“The new digitised world demands infrastructure solutions that are extremely scalable and flexible in terms of delivery performance and connectivity models and that offer full data protection with a wide choice of user-selected protection methods,” said Amita Potnis, research manager, storage team, IDC. “With continual innovation in object storage technologies and features, DDN’s object storage platform is leading end users along this path of digitalisation.“

Newly released WOS data protection offering, Extended ObjectAssure, expands customer choice of protection methods, resulting in a variety of data-protection options. WOS’s low overhead expenses make the cost of object storage competitive with tape storage alternatives. It also enables faster rebuild times that lower the risk of data loss during a rebuild and eliminate or limit performance impacts from drive failures.

The firm’s expanded S3 multi-site capabilities bolster collaboration, DR and content distribution for customers with multi-site data sharing needs and provide fast, error-free data transfers. With S3 interface, customers have a faster, cost-effective, secure and reliable alternative to public clouds.

“Object storage is really coming into its own with surging adoption across key use cases like large active archives, multi-site collaboration, content distribution, disk backup and DR,” said Laura Shepard, senior director, product marketing, DDN. “The new WOS features give our customers the lowest data protection overhead option in the industry, which directly translates to big cost savings. For sites that need to move a lot of data quickly and reliably for collaboration or backup, the new S3 multi-site feature delivers sizeable numbers of large objects faster and more reliably than public cloud solutions.“

The company’s suite of WOS object storage solutions includes WOS as software-only and several appliances that start as small as a few hundred terabytes.

Key advantages of WOS object storage platform include:

Low cost and high efficiency: WOS solutions up level the management and scalability TCO gains of object storage with a unique NoFS (no file system) architecture that offers hard cost savings versus competitive solutions, up to 99% efficiency, and operational cost savings in space, heating, cooling and administration.
High object storage performance: WOS delivers more than 1.25x the speed per node of competing commercial and open-source offerings, as proven by WOS customers in real-world applications.
Availability advantages: In addition to today’s announced Extended ObjectAssure, WOS has additional erasure coding and replication combinations that provide customers with a wide variety of data protection and availability choices. It can be configured to rebuild failed drives within a single node, thus reducing rebuild time and risk of data loss. This capability is crucial as larger drive sizes are boosting rebuild times and challenging organisations’ abilities to meet line-of-business data availability SLAs.
Flexible and massively scalable: The simplicity of the WOS architecture allows organisations to start as small as a single WOS appliance in four standard rack units and scale in single-node increments. It can deliver up to a quarter-million drives in a solitary, shared namespace and provide a single view of files and objects, thus allowing it to provide performance storage for active archive and collaboration environments.

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WOS has been powering object storage infrastructure for customers worldwide for more than eight years. New customers include Cold Springs Harbor, Van Andel and Children’s Mercy Hospital, Kansas City, KS. In addition, the University of Edinburgh‘s Parallel Computing Centre is evaluating WOS object storage to support an infinitely scalable storage pool and to manage better what will become a large active archive of research data. As detailed in a recent case study, the goal of its deployment will be to offer a highly scalable, cost-effective alternative to file storage to the university’s industry users and tier 3 HPC centers that are being established around the UK.

“We’re entering a period of huge innovation both in HPC and storage,” said Mark Parsons, director, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. “Companies like DDN, which continue to innovate, best allow us to support scientists and researchers across all kinds of businesses to harness the potential of technology and to accelerate life-changing discoveries.“

The WOS data protection and connectivity features are available this quarter across the company’s WOS solution suite.

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