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March 5, 2014

DDN Joins Active Archive Alliance

SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 5 — DataDirect Networks (DDN) today took another definitive step in the expansion of its ecosystem for archive solutions by announcing that it is joining the Active Archive Alliance. This latest move underscores DDN’s focus on delivering industry leading end-to-end data management solutions from high performance primary storage to cost effective 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 seamless inter-compatibility and ease of use as data is migrated across the tiers of storage. The Active Archive Alliance is the industry association users turn to for thought leadership and demonstrated vendor compatibility for long-term, cost effective data retention solutions. 

DDN’s collaboration with the Active Archive Alliance continues its mission of bringing together the best technology and thought leadership from companies actively innovating to solve customer demands for cost-effective, highly available, searchable storage for massive amounts of data.

Built to address the storage needs of the most data intensive environments, DDN’s suite of products supports the entire data lifecycle, providing customers with the highest levels of performance, efficiency and protection.

The GRIDScaler parallel file system and NAS appliance provides massively 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 industry leading performance, the highest access speeds, and user defined data protection options that can cross geographies.

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

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, hard disk drives, magnetic tape and optical disk.

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

With over a decade of leadership in the highest performance and largest capacity storage environments for super computing, HPC, media and entertainment, and cloud storage, DDN’s product line has been developed to meet the diverse and dynamic demands of today’s massive unstructured data generators. Complete active archive solutions from DDN allow users to tier data from file-based workflows into a simple, scalable archive. This gives users the ability to directly access all data for disaster recovery or enable access to data via a “follow the sun” model, maximizing data protection, organizational productivity and speeding time-to-insight.

“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 data storage and management requirements,” said Molly Rector, Chief Marketing Officer, DDN.

“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,” said Floyd Christofferson, Active Archive Alliance Chairman of the Board.

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