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.