DDN WOS8460 Object Storage Appliance

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announce the WOS8460, an object storage appliance that delivers cost-optimised capacity with enough performance to support the growing number of object use cases.

It delivers hard cost advantages, faster performance, availability and density, in configurations that can start smaller and scale in more granular increments than competing offerings.

WOS is making it easier for IT organisations to realise object storage efficiencies across expanded use cases, such as active archive and collaborative communities. With almost 7PB of capacity per rack, the WOS8460 provides a 20% density advantage over its closest competitor. WOS’ density and ability to scale a single node at a time make it efficient on space, power and cooling.

“Object storage is a rising star in storage,” said Chris M Evans, technology analyst and subject matter expert for blog Architecting IT, and co-founder, Langton Blue Ltd. “DDN is making object storage solutions practical for many uses beyond Web 2.0 and Enterprise IT to include collaboration communities, software-as-a-service and active archives. This is excellent news as it translates into big cost savings and new IT architectural options for many organisations across the world.“

“Centralising our storage requirements with DDN has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars as we replaced separate systems with a comprehensive storage solution ideally suited for a diverse mix of scientific workflows,” said Zachary Ramjan, architect, research computing, Van Andel Research Institute. “As a result, our scientists now have unprecedented flexibility to explore and process research data using different instruments and varied workflows as needed.“

Complete suite of WOS object storage solutions includes two performance appliances: the WOS7000 and the WOS8460 appliance, and the WOS9660 capacity appliance, plus WOS as software-only.

Key firm’s object storage advantages with WOS include:

• High object storage cost savings and efficiency: WOS solution suite takes the management and scalability TCO gains of object storage a step further with its NoFS (no file system) architecture that offers hard cost savings versus competitive solutions. As the only object storage solution that doesn’t require an underlying file system, WOS cuts hardware acquisition costs and is up to 99% efficient, which puts it well ahead of other object implementations that lose six to 20% efficiency due to file system overhead and block waste. It also provides operational cost savings for things like space saving, heating, cooling and administration.

• High object storage performance: WOS delivers 1.25x the speed per node of competing commercial and open-source offerings, as verified by WOS customers in real-world applications. WOS’ NoFS and built-in latency-mapping technology ensures the fastest route to requested data. WOS gives customers the critical performance levels needed to scale object storage implementations locally or across multiple sites.

• Industry availability advantages: WOS can rebuild failed drives within a single node, which reduces rebuild time and risk of data loss. This capability is important as drive sizes grow larger thus boosting rebuild times and challenging organisations’ abilities to meet line of business data availability SLAs. By comparison, other object storage offerings rely on LAN or WAN-based rebuilds which increases rebuild time and risk of data loss.

• Scalability: The simplicity of the WOS architecture allows organisations to start as small as a two-node WOS cluster in four standard rack units and scale in single node increments. Competitive offerings often require five to twenty servers to start and are extremely restrictive in how they scale. WOS can deliver up to a quarter-million drives in a single, shared namespace and provide a single view of files and objects, thus allowing it to provide high-performance storage for active archive and collaboration environments.

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Company’s appliance and software-only options give customers expanded architectural flexibility and choice. Appliance delivery models allow organisations to deploy complete, preconfigured solutions with end-to-end 24×7 support, while software-defined architectures give customers complete configuration flexibility and control. The firm started marketing software-only WOS a year ago, and in that time, the share of software-only customers has grown to more than 10%. The WOS software-only solution has given customers like Weill Cornell, Guosen Securities and Compute Canada the ability to specify industry-standard hardware from suppliers like HPE, Supermicro and Dell that fits specific requirements for their use cases.

“The growing number of use cases that object storage can satisfy represents a huge opportunity for DDN – especially as cases like collaboration and active archive for large and ‘forever’ data sets are concentrated in DDN customer sites and well-established DDN markets,” said Molly Rector, CMO, EVP, product management and worldwide marketing, DDN. “WOS’ differentiated benefits give it a strong competitive advantage for current and emerging use cases, and with multiple appliance and software-only options customers have complete architectural flexibility and choice.“

The WOS8460 appliance will be available in November 2016.

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