Founded by the French in 1998 and based in California, DataDirect Networks - aka DDN - is particularly known for its high-performance storage systems for the HPC world.

In order to meet the demand of some of its customers who have to deal with the storage and archiving of very large amounts of data. The company designed in 2009 its object storage system WOS (Web Object Scaler). In its latest version, this distributed storage system can handle up to 1 exabyte of data (per cluster assembly of 128 Po).

Kết quả hình ảnh cho công nghệ 4.0

The data is protected via an erase code mechanism coupled with replication mechanisms. The supported access mechanisms are the home API (WOS API), the Amazon S3 API as well as the Microsoft SMB protocols (and NFS via clustered gateways). The technology is either offered as an appliance on DDN nodes or in software form, deployable on HPE, Dell, SuperMicro servers, etc.

The strong point of WOS is DDN's focus on performance, which would be among the best in the market. Compared to the OpenStack Swift API, DDN estimates that it offers 12 times better performance per hard disk in the cluster and 5 times lower write latency. The manufacturer also estimates that it can read 10 times more objects per second per server than a system under Swift.

In fact, according to DDN, a WOS cluster can provide up to 9.8 TB / sec of bandwidth across a namespace and can access up to 256 million files / objects per second. Another strong point of WOS is its integration with the manufacturer's high-performance storage systems via a gateway and tiering mechanism that allows it to host data from a Spectrum Scale (ex-GPFS) or Luster cluster. or a large NAS DDN system.

According to Gartner, one of the main weaknesses of the system is that WOS does not implement authentication or encryption mechanisms on its native Rest API. Any application that knows the identifier of an object can access it. WOS assumes that the data is protected by the fact that object identifiers are hard to guess, but for Gartner, this approach is not enough.

DataDirect Networks WOS is part of the Magic Quadrant for object storage and clustered file system actors as seen by Gartner (Gartner source, October 2016) where it is cataloged as a niche player (Niche Player).