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DDN Storage is a company that, in more  than 15 years (was founded in 1998), has designed, developed, deployed and optimized systems, software and solutions which enable enterprises, service providers, universities and government agencies to generate more value and accelerate time to insight from their data and information, on premise and in the cloud. It’s one the the leader in the HPC market (2/3 of the top 500 supercomputers run on DDN), the largest private storage company in world, with double digit growth, still profitable and self funded.

During the last A3 Communications Technology Live I’ve got the opportunity to learn more about their solution and their position.

Their solution is designed to scale, but maintain good perforance (or also scale on performance) compared to many architectures and systems that work flawlessly when managing capacity in terabytes and drive only a few million IOPS and a few dozen of GB/s of bandwidth – often break or become highly inefficient when you try to scale above their limits.

Their product family has four different flash array solutions:

  • EFA (Enterprise Feature-Ready Architecture): High Performance, Fully Enterprise Featured NAS-based Array for Virtual Server and Database. File Level & Cloud Ready storage.
  • SFA (Performance First-Ready Architecture): Performance & Scalability Prioritized Block Array for Mixed I/O Workloads. Only block level storage.
  • IME (Lowest I/O Latency-Ready Architecture): Ultra Low Latency, High Throughput Flash Tier for Accelerating Real-time HPC, Big Data & IoT Applications. File Level Caching.
  • Scaler Appliance (multi PB File System Ready Architecture): Massively Scalable, High Performance, Single Namespace File Storage Appliances. File Level & Cloud Ready storage.

But they have also hybrid solutios and several type of appliances.

And WOS, their Object Storage platform, is playing a big role in the future and in their strategy  for addressing the growth and management of unstructured data. It’s available both as an hardware appliance or you build as an SDS solution on a x86 commodity hardware:

WOS possesses a powerful combination of high-performance, flexible protection, superior multi-site capabilities and storage efficiencies that make it the perfect solution for a wide range of use cases including:

  • Active Archive Repositories
  • Content Distribution
  • Distributed Collaboration Workflows
  • Enterprise Content Repositories
  • File Sync and Share
  • Geospatial Images and Video Surveillance
  • Scale-out Web and Cloud Services
  • Video Post-production

An it’s interesting see how they are moving from the HPC area the enterprise one: enterprise data management is becoming increasingly complex due to the amount and variety of sources of data and most of organizations seek a unified, end-to-end data solution which delivers scalable storage, is easy to manage, and provides complete control over price performance. DDN propose their solutions as Data Lifecycle Management products.

Of course enteprise need also integration with existing appliancation and the S3 and Swift Access Gateways enables S3 and Swift compatible applications/clients to access and store data on WOS private clouds. Same for the NFS/SMB Gateway that provides NFS and CIFS/SMB file-level access.

Disclaimer: A3 Communications has invited me to this even and they has covered also the travel expenses, but I am not compensated for my time and I’m not obliged to blog. Furthermore, the content is not reviewed, approved or published by any other person than me.

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.