The Independent IT Influencer Event
Event: Wireless Field Day 4
Appearance: Aruba Networks Presents at Wireless Field Day 4
Company: HPE Aruba Networking
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Personnel: Ozer Dondurmacioglu
How to select the best architecture?
Event: Wireless Field Day 4
Appearance: Aruba Networks Presents at Wireless Field Day 4
Company: HPE Aruba Networking
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Personnel: Rob Gin, Sujatha Mandava
Aruba Networks introduces and demonstrates AirWave at Wireless Field Day 4, February 14, 2013
Event: Wireless Field Day 4
Appearance: Wi-Fi Stress Tests with Keith Parsons
Company: N/A
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Personnel: Keith Parsons
Keith Parsons demonstrates his Wi-Fi stress testing methodology. He begins with an overview presentation, then demonstrates uploading and downloading using an Apple Airport Extreme and Metageek Wi-Spy.
Event: Wireless Field Day 4
Appearance: Juniper Presents at Wireless Field Day 4
Company: Juniper Networks
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Personnel: Jonathan Davidson, Tamir Hardof
Jonathan Davidson and Tamir Hardof Introduce the Juniper Session at Wireless Field Day 4 on February 14, 2013 in Sunnyvale, CA
Event: Wireless Field Day 4
Appearance: Motorola Solutions Presents at Wireless Field Day 4
Company: Motorola
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Personnel: Vik Evans
Event: Wireless Field Day 4
Appearance: Motorola Solutions Presents at Wireless Field Day 4
Company: Motorola
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Personnel: Sriram Venkiteswaran
Event: Wireless Field Day 4
Appearance: Motorola Solutions Presents at Wireless Field Day 4
Company: Motorola
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Personnel: Cherie Martin, Sriram Venkiteswaran
Event: Tech Field Day 5
Appearance: NetEx Presents at Tech Field Day 5
Company: NetEx
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Personnel: Bob MacIntyre, Nancy Golio
Recorded at Tech Field Day 5 on February 11, 2011, the NetEx presentation by Bob MacIntyre and Nancy Golio showcased their HyperIP software’s capabilities in WAN acceleration using a memorable beer bottle analogy. The presenters began by providing background on NetEx, a company that spun out of StorageTek in 1999 and is based in Minneapolis. They highlighted the company’s focus on enterprise server software and WAN optimization, specifically targeting disaster recovery (DR) applications, backup, and large data transfers. The presenters emphasized that HyperIP is designed to optimize data movement between data centers, ensuring timely and reliable delivery of mission-critical data.
The core of the presentation revolved around explaining the challenges of latency and packet loss in wide area networks (WANs) and how HyperIP addresses these issues. Using a creative analogy involving beer bottles, the presenters illustrated the inefficiencies of traditional TCP/IP protocols over WANs. In the analogy, beer bottles represented data packets, and the process of passing them along a line of people demonstrated the delays and potential losses that occur in a WAN environment. HyperIP mitigates these issues by terminating TCP connections locally, aggregating data packets, and using UDP for transmission between HyperIP appliances. This approach allows HyperIP to maintain high throughput and minimize the impact of latency and packet loss, effectively keeping the data “pipe” full and ensuring efficient data transfer.
The technical details of HyperIP were further elaborated, highlighting its deployment as a virtual machine that requires minimal resources and can be easily integrated into existing networks. The software uses advanced flow control mechanisms based on network capacity, round-trip time, and receiver rate feedback to optimize data transfer. HyperIP also supports features like compression, selective retransmission, and rate limiting, making it suitable for various network environments, including those with high packet loss. The presentation concluded with examples of HyperIP’s effectiveness in real-world scenarios, such as improving data transfer for online gaming companies and working seamlessly with data deduplication solutions. Overall, the demonstration effectively conveyed how HyperIP enhances WAN performance, ensuring reliable and efficient data movement across geographically dispersed locations.
Event: Tech Field Day 5
Appearance: Druva Presents at Tech Field Day 5
Company: Druva
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Personnel: Jaspreet Singh
Recorded on February 10, 2011, this video was the first American introduction of Druva and their enterprise endpoint protection product. Jaspreet Singh, Co-Founder and CEO of Druva, introduces the company and its technology, Singh discusses the customer pain points related to endpoint data protection, issues with existing backup solutions, and the new Druva approach.
In his presentation at Tech Field Day 8, Jaspreet Singh introduced Druva as a company focused on providing endpoint data protection solutions for enterprises. Founded by a team of former Veritas engineers, Druva was created to address data protection in increasingly mobile and decentralized workplace environments, prioritizing simplicity, performance, and minimal resource usage. Singh highlighted the growing challenge of managing backup needs across laptops and mobile devices, citing that the average corporate laptop now holds about 10GB of data, and that bandwidth limitations make traditional backup methods impractical. In response, Druva aimed to create a fresh and compelling solution that wasn’t just a repurposing of legacy products.
Singh explained that Druva’s flagship product, inSync, was designed from the ground up for modern endpoints, with a 40MB lightweight stack and seamless deployment that avoids the need for additional infrastructure like databases or web servers. A key differentiator was Druva’s global source-based deduplication, which is application-aware and significantly more accurate than traditional deduplication methods. This deduplication strategy recognizes complex data structures, like those in PST or Office files, determining precise boundaries for emails and attachments to optimize storage and minimize network usage. Druva’s architecture also incorporates multi-threaded backup transfers to reduce latency, works intelligently in varied network conditions, and ensures backups are non-intrusive for end users by regulating CPU and bandwidth usage and delaying backup tasks during startup or battery consumption.
The presentation concluded with a discussion of Druva’s restoration capabilities and forward-looking vision. The inSync product offered rapid, search-based file recovery accessible via desktop, browser, or mobile clients like iPads. While full iPad backup functionality was not yet supported due to platform limitations, Singh shared Druva’s ambition to expand beyond simple backup to broader enterprise data management, including secure remote wipe and data access management. Despite the rise of cloud services like Gmail and Exchange, Singh emphasized that many organizations still store significant data locally on laptops—especially email caches due to corporate server quotas—making laptop backup essential for data recovery and productivity continuity. Druva’s solution therefore aimed to fill existing gaps in endpoint protection with purpose-built technology rather than retrofitted legacy tools.
Event: Tech Field Day 1
Appearance: VMware Presents at Tech Field Day 1
Company: VMware by Broadcom
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Personnel: Tim Myers
This video was taken at the Gestalt IT Field Day (November 2009) with this session being held at VMware. Tim Myers (Senior Architect) gives more information and background to the design of the VMware “Booth Rack” that was used at the VMworld 2009 event in San Francisco.
Event: Tech Field Day 2
Appearance: EMC Presents at Tech Field Day 2
Company: EMC
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Personnel: Chad Sakac
Event: Tech Field Day 1
Appearance: Ocarina Networks Presents at Tech Field Day 1
Company: Ocarina Networks
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Event: Wireless Field Day 1
Appearance: Aerohive Presents at Wireless Field Day 1
Company: Aerohive
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Personnel: Bob O'Hara
In his presentation at Wireless Field Day 1, Bob O’Hara, co-founder of Airespace, delves into the origins and evolution of the controller-based architecture for enterprise Wi-Fi networks. He recounts the early 2000s when managing a multitude of access points was a significant challenge for enterprises. To address this, Airespace developed a centralized hierarchical system that stripped functions from individual access points and centralized them into a controller. This architecture allowed for easier configuration and management of wireless LANs, as the controller could automatically push configurations to all access points and collect data for analysis. The system’s ability to present this data in a user-friendly format with graphical overlays helped enterprises optimize their wireless networks effectively.
O’Hara explains that the decision to centralize functions was driven by economic constraints. At the time, the cost of powerful processors that could handle all necessary functions within each access point was prohibitive. Instead, Airespace leveraged the growing capabilities of Linux-based embedded processing and network processing silicon to build a robust central controller. This controller could process large amounts of data quickly and redistribute it to the access points, adding value that individual access points could not provide due to their limited processing power. This approach proved successful, leading to Airespace’s acquisition by Cisco in 2005, which further validated the effectiveness of their solution.
Reflecting on his journey, O’Hara notes the shift in technology and economics that has since occurred. Modern access points now have sufficient processing power at a lower cost, enabling a more distributed architecture as seen in Aerohive’s model. Despite the differences in physical implementation, O’Hara emphasizes that the core achievement of Airespace was making wireless LANs attractive and manageable for large enterprises. He highlights the dramatic increase in the adoption of wireless LANs from the early 2000s to the present, attributing this success to the foundational work done by Airespace. O’Hara concludes by expressing his long-held vision, inspired by science fiction, of achieving instantaneous, ubiquitous wireless communication, a goal that Wi-Fi technology is steadily making a reality.
Event: Tech Field Day 3
Appearance: Nimble Storage Presents at Tech Field Day 3
Company: Nimble Storage
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Personnel: Dan Leary, Umesh Maheshwari, Varun Mehta
On July 15, 2010, Nimble Storage chose Tech Field Day 3 in Seattle to unveil their company and hybrid storage array product. This video was not released at that time, but should be of some historic interest today for historical reasons following Nimble’s acquisition by HPE. At Tech Field Day 3, company co-founders Varun Mehta and Umesh Maheshwari, along with marketing VP Dan Leary and senior product manager Ajay Singh, introduced Nimble Storage to an audience of independent technologists. They emphasized their deep expertise from companies like NetApp, Data Domain, and Sun, and positioned Nimble as a novel solution aimed at transforming storage for mid-sized enterprises. The team shared their vision of combining primary storage, backup, and disaster recovery into a single, easy-to-manage system optimized for performance and cost.
Nimble’s solution stood out through its unique CASL (Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout) architecture, which utilized flash memory as a cache layered on low-cost SATA disks, enhancing performance while minimizing storage costs. The system provided efficient real-time compression, granular block-level tracking for snapshots, and adaptive cache management to serve frequently accessed data with high performance. This architecture enabled storing up to 60-90 days of compressed snapshots on the primary system, eliminating traditional backup windows and simplifying disaster recovery. The product was designed with ease-of-use in mind, featuring application-defined templates and automated protection policies, making it especially suitable for IT generalists in mid-market organizations who needed simplified SAN management.
By integrating backup and DR functionalities typically handled by separate systems, Nimble claimed it could replace multiple traditional arrays and disk-based backup appliances with a single hybrid box. This consolidation led to significant savings in both upfront costs and ongoing operational complexity. Customers could implement efficient WAN replication using capacity-optimized snapshots without the need for separate dedupe appliances or complex DR solutions. One early adopter, a state government IT shop, reported faster backups, simpler restores, and a dramatic reduction in infrastructure — all while staying within budget. Throughout the presentation, the Nimble team acknowledged competition from tiered flash systems and ZFS-based vendors but emphasized their unique architectural advantages and operational simplicity as key differentiators.
Event: Tech Field Day 1
Appearance: MDS Micro Presents at Tech Field Day 1
Company: MDS Micro
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Personnel: Karriem Adams
MDS Micro presents their Cloud Matrix architecture, featuring the Quad-V mini blade system, a highly modular and efficient server solution optimized for virtualization environments. Developed in close collaboration with VMware engineers, the Cloud Matrix is designed to offer enterprise-grade performance while reducing footprint, power consumption, and cost, addressing the evolving needs of data centers.
During the presentation at Tech Field Day 1, Karriem Adams of MDS Micro explained the origins and purpose of the Quad-V system, emphasizing its modular 2U chassis that houses four hot-swappable servers. Unlike traditional blade chassis requiring full racks regardless of actual demand, Quad-V allows enterprises to scale incrementally. Designed in collaboration with VMware architects, Quad-V was engineered to address both performance bottlenecks and space inefficiencies. The Cloud Matrix consists of two main components: the server layer built on these Quad-V blades, and the networking layer powered by Zeego switches providing high-bandwidth InfiniBand connectivity. This combination enabled data center setups, such as VMware’s 2009 VMworld event booth, to consolidate operations from 14 racks to just half of one.
Adams also highlighted the Cloud Matrix’s technical advantages, including integrated InfiniBand for high-speed I/O, support for multiple processor platforms within a single chassis, and a hot-swappable, low-power design with on-board virtualization support. The solution supports various storage configurations, from traditional drives to SSDs, while remaining hardware agnostic, ensuring seamless integration with existing data center infrastructure. With support for up to 384 GB of RAM and 48 cores per chassis, and software like SimpleView for unified IPMI-based management, Cloud Matrix delivers high density, scalability, and power efficiency. The system can fit 84 servers, up to 672 cores and over 8TB of RAM in a single 42U rack, making it a compelling option for enterprises looking to enhance their virtualization capabilities while maintaining flexibility and reducing TCO.
Event: Tech Field Day 8
Appearance: SolidFire Presents at Tech Field Day 8
Company: SolidFire
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Personnel: Dave Wright
Dave Wright, founder of SolidFire, presents the company’s architecture and vision at Tech Field Day 8. Drawing on his prior experience at Jungle Disk and Rackspace, Wright outlines the key storage challenges in cloud environments and how SolidFire built a solution from the ground up to meet the performance, efficiency, and automation needs of large-scale cloud service providers.
The presentation begins with Dave Wright recounting his background at Jungle Disk and Rackspace, where early exposure to cloud hosting challenges, especially around storage, served as the impetus for founding SolidFire. At Rackspace, he observed a lack of scalable, cost-effective, and high-performance storage solutions suitable for cloud infrastructures. These insights led SolidFire to focus specifically on building a platform designed for service providers, addressing the inadequacies of traditional enterprise storage systems that struggled with multi-tenancy, cost control, and consistent performance at cloud scale.
Wright explains that SolidFire’s value proposition is built on three foundational pillars: performance, efficiency, and automation. To handle multi-tenant cloud environments, SolidFire prioritizes consistent and guaranteed performance through a concept called “performance virtualization,” separating performance controls from capacity configuration. The system allows configuration of both IOPS and throughput per volume, with adjustable burst capabilities and enforcement mechanisms. This ensures predictable application behavior while mitigating noisy neighbor issues—a key capability lacking in traditional SANs. Equally important is efficiency: SolidFire’s scale-out architecture allows high utilization (up to 85% or more) and leverages real-time compression, deduplication, and thin provisioning to reduce unnecessary resource consumption.
Perhaps most distinctively, SolidFire embeds automation deeply into its DNA. Wright emphasizes that for service providers operating at cloud scale, human management does not scale. SolidFire circumvents this by leading with a comprehensive REST-based API for deployment, provisioning, and configuration. This enables rapid instrumentation of storage, akin to how compute is automated in data centers. Wright demonstrates that new nodes can be added or removed with minimal manual intervention, and SolidFire integrates natively with emerging cloud orchestration platforms like OpenStack and VMware vCloud.
From a technical perspective, SolidFire’s architecture diverges significantly from traditional RAID-based SAN technologies. Data is split into 4K blocks, deduplicated at ingest based on cryptographic hashes, and mapped to metadata volumes via a distributed system of BINs. The system utilizes standard x86 hardware with SSD-only drives, relying on replication instead of RAID for redundancy. This minimizes rebuild times—sometimes to mere seconds—while limiting the impact of failures to the smallest possible subset of the system. Storage snapshots and clones are created via metadata copies without performance degradation or data duplication, and the system is engineered to facilitate efficient backup and replication capabilities through its block identifier approach.
In conclusion, Wright underlines that SolidFire’s use of commodity hardware, all-flash design, and intelligent software stack allows a competitive price point—under $5 per gigabyte for effective, usable capacity. By combining high performance, cost-efficiency, granular performance guarantees, and true API-driven automation, SolidFire offers a compelling solution for cloud providers dealing with the complexities of multi-tenant environments and application performance SLAs. Wright’s presentation not only outlines a robust technical architecture but also makes a case for the alignment of SolidFire’s design principles with the real-world needs of next-generation cloud infrastructure providers.
Event: Tech Field Day 8
Appearance: Arista Presents at Tech Field Day 8
Company: Arista
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Personnel: Andre Pech, Jayshree Ullal
In this session, Arista explores its novel network software architecture, Extensible Operating System (EOS), emphasizing its unique design, extensibility, and integration with existing systems. The presentation, led primarily by software engineer Andre Pech and joined by CEO Jayshree Ullal, outlines how EOS allows for flexible, resilient, and developer-accessible network configuration and management. Arista also demonstrates real-world use cases and answers technical questions from industry experts.
Andre Pech begins the presentation by introducing Arista’s Extensible Operating System (EOS), highlighting its architectural design that draws lessons from the Unix paradigm. He emphasizes that EOS is based on an unmodified Linux kernel with separate, independent user-space processes handling different functionalities. Unlike traditional network operating systems that often rely on monolithic kernels susceptible to crashes, Arista’s architecture isolates failures, allowing individual processes to crash and restart independently without bringing down the whole system. This modular design facilitates better resilience, faster upgrades, and easier debugging, fostering a server-like robustness in networking hardware.
A focal point of the presentation is SysDB, Arista’s system database, which functions as the central state repository for EOS. SysDB avoids the need for complex message-passing systems by storing the entire network configuration and status data in a single place. Agents or applications mount parts of SysDB and are notified of relevant state changes. This architecture not only improves modularity and fault tolerance but also enables features such as in-service software upgrades (ISSU) by simply updating and restarting individual processes without interrupting the system’s operation. Pech illustrates this with a live demo involving the Spanning Tree process, showing that killing and restarting it results in no disruptions to forwarding behavior due to state persistence in SysDB.
The session also covers EOS’s extensibility at multiple levels, from native Linux access to scripting with the EOS CLI, and deeper integration through Python APIs that interface directly with SysDB. Pech demonstrates how engineers can use standard Linux tools like bash, TCPdump, and scripting languages to access, monitor, and extend switch functionalities—treating the switch almost like a regular Linux server. One highlight includes a demonstration of using XMPP (Jabber protocol) to create a chat-based interface where switches can exchange information, enabling group-based configuration, real-time queries, and management across the network.
Further discussion explores Arista’s operational tools and partnerships, including integration with VMware ESX through VM Tracer, which dynamically updates VLAN assignments and configurations based on virtual machine movements. Attendees inquire about support for L3 protocols, port mirroring, and debugging capabilities, revealing Arista’s robust feature set tailored for complex data center environments. Pech stresses the focus on open standards and the drive toward features like VXLAN and NVGRE for scalable virtual networking, keeping Arista at the forefront of network virtualization and multi-tenant cloud solutions.
CEO Jayshree Ullal joins the session toward the end to address business and industry trends, explaining how Arista’s strategy aligns with evolving data center needs without vendor lock-in. She emphasizes that the company’s focus remains on best-of-breed, standards-based, software-driven switching. Questions about multi-vendor environments, competition with Cisco and Dell, and future support for technologies like Trill and Fibre Channel over Ethernet are candidly addressed. Ullal insists that Arista’s software-centric approach, combined with transparent pricing and elite support from engineers themselves, positions them uniquely in a crowded networking market poised for next-generation growth.
Event: Tech Field Day 8
Appearance: Pure Storage Presents at Tech Field Day 8
Company: Pure Storage
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Personnel: John Colgrove, John Hayes, Michael Cornwell, Scott Dietzen
Pure Storage discussed their vision and technology at Tech Field Day 8, advocating for the widespread adoption of all-flash storage in the enterprise. The company outlined how their purpose-built solution delivers significant improvements in performance, power consumption, and cost-efficiency over traditional spinning disks and hybrid storage systems. The presentation delved into the limitations of 15K RPM drives and the need to move beyond performance disks by eliminating legacy architectures and leveraging flash memory’s capabilities.
During the presentation, CEO Scott Dietzen explained that while CPU performance has dramatically increased over the past 15 years, disk I/O has lagged, creating a major bottleneck. Current storage systems spend unnecessarily on underperforming disk drives, especially for high-performance demands. Existing all-flash solutions suffer from limiting costs and poor scalability in enterprise environments. The Pure Storage team emphasized solving this with innovation on two fronts: making flash as reliable and available as disk, and reducing the total cost of ownership through aggressive data reduction, dynamic RAID schemes, and flash optimization.
Cofounders John Colgrove and John Hayes, along with flash technologist Michael Cornwell, detailed the architecture behind the Pure Storage solution, including advanced inline data deduplication and compression, RAID 3D for increased reliability, and an operating environment called Purity, which virtualizes flash while supporting real-time data integrity and performance. The system supports sub-millisecond latency and scales across enterprise workloads. The team also showcased a high-density VMware demo, consolidating 800 VMs with high deduplication ratios and exceptional performance, positioning Pure Storage as an enterprise-class contender with innovative software-driven flash storage.
Event: Tech Field Day 8
Appearance: DDN Presents at Tech Field Day 8
Company: DataDirect Networks
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Personnel: Jean-Luc Chatelain, Jeff Denworth
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.
Event: Tech Field Day 8
Appearance: DDN Presents at Tech Field Day 8
Company: DataDirect Networks
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Personnel: Jean-Luc Chatelain, Jeff Denworth
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.
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