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This Presentation date is September 15, 2011 at 16:00.
Presenters: Jean-Luc Chatelain, Jeff Denworth
DataDirect Networks presents at Tech Field Day 8 (Part 1)
DataDirect Networks (DDN) introduces their company, product philosophy, and key technologies during their presentation at Tech Field Day 8. In part one, Jeff Denworth and Jean-Luc Chatelain focus on the evolution of hyperscale data storage needs, the shortcomings of traditional storage infrastructures, and how DDN’s platforms are built to meet the demands of emerging data environments including cloud, high-performance computing, life sciences, government, and media.
During the presentation, Jeff Denworth establishes DDN’s identity as a $200+ million privately held company specialized in ultra-high-performance data solutions, targeting uncommon yet profound data challenges in industries like genomics, supercomputing, video surveillance, and cloud content services. He introduces DDN’s storage array architecture—SFA (Storage Fusion Architecture)—which supports high throughput and IOPS using a smaller number of SSDs, thereby offering efficiency and scale. Jeff then transitions to discuss WAN Object Scaler (WOS), DDN’s object storage platform specifically built to solve performance and scalability limits in traditional SAN and file systems when managing billions of data objects at petabyte scales.
Jean-Luc Chatelain takes over to delve into the limitations of file-based systems when applied to massive-scale data issues, such as inefficiencies in I/O performance, metadata overhead, configuration complexity, and rising total cost of ownership. He introduces WOS as a “noFS” (no file system) hyperscale object storage solution that enables distributed, geo-replicated, self-healing storage with flat namespace architecture, low overhead, and efficient metadata handling. With practical use cases from defense agencies to surveillance systems to global media companies, WOS demonstrates significant performance gains, architectural simplicity, and linear scalability, addressing the real-world needs of organizations facing exponential data growth in a distributed and latency-sensitive world.
Personnel: Jean-Luc Chatelain, Jeff Denworth
DataDirect Networks presents at Tech Field Day 8 (Part 2)
In this presentation from Tech Field Day 8, DataDirect Networks (DDN) demonstrates the deployment and management of their Web Object Scaler (WOS) system. The focus is on how WOS can quickly be installed and brought online at customer sites, providing object storage services through a streamlined setup process. The WOS architecture allows for scalable, policy-driven object storage across geographically distributed nodes, all managed through a single, intuitive interface.
The setup process begins by connecting new WOS nodes to the network and assigning IP addresses, after which an administrator can access the unified management interface via a browser. This UI provides centralized management for all nodes in a global cluster, regardless of location. The user can configure new zones that reflect physical data center locations and add nodes to these zones with simple drag-and-drop functionality. Once added, the cluster automatically integrates the nodes with minimal configuration and no service downtime. Policies drive the storage behavior, enabling administrators to define data replication rules for performance and reliability, including synchronous and asynchronous modes where replicas are written to local or distributed nodes.
To showcase the capabilities and resilience of WOS, the demo includes a latency test involving a simulated failure of a local node and automatic failover to a remote node without service interruption. This demonstrates WOS’s built-in data locality and latency optimization, which relies on each node’s dynamic in-memory latency map to route data access efficiently. The system ensures immediate availability and minimum latency by always selecting the nearest available replica of the data. DDN’s WOS offers a robust and flexible backend for object storage needs, delivering scalability and performance that are critical for modern enterprise and cloud environments.
Personnel: Jean-Luc Chatelain, Jeff Denworth