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.