Latest DDN Launch Fills out its WOS Object Storage Line

(cybrain/Shutterstock)

DataDirect Networks (DDN) today introduced a third member to its WOS object storage product line, the WOS 8460, aimed at active archive and collaboration use cases. Object storage, once mainly restricted to ‘cold’ archives for large quantities of unstructured data – think content delivery networks (CDN) used in conjunction with the web – has been slowly expanding its footprint into other application areas.

The new DDN product fills out the company’s object storage portfolio and is positioned between DDN’s WOS 9660 offering, intended more for traditional ‘cold’ archives, and WOS 7000, which is well suited for embedded applications such as use with S3. One interesting departure with the WOS product line from DDN’s heritage is willingness to use commodity hardware or third-party hardware generally for its WOS line.

“We have historically been a box company. With WOS, we are aggressively going to market with a software defined offering,” said Kurt Kuckein, senior product manager, DDN, in a pre-launch briefing, “Just in the last year since we announced our emphasis on SDF, we’ve gone from something like two percent of our installed base being software only to well over 10 percent of our WOS installed base. So they are Dell or Supermicro or HPE.

“We have templates for those customers if they want something easy or we will work with them on whatever host-CPU thing they want to use or Lenovo or whatever. You can start very small, a POC initiative that starts really tiny whereas most of the competitive implementations start at a minimum of six nodes and some are as large as 18 to just get off the ground.”

To read the rest of the article, go www.hpcwire.com/2016/09/13/latest-ddn-launch-fills-wos-object-storage-line.