TechTarget: Randy Kerns quoted on DDN WOS update

“Hyper-converged DDN storage unveiled with upgrades to WOS 360” by Sonia Lelii, TechTarget

High-performance computing specialist DataDirect Networks (DDN) today previewed a hyper-converged system — codenamed “Wolfcreek” — that it expects to launch late this year, and upgraded its WOS 360 object storage platform.

DDN CEO Alex Bouzari said Wolfcreek will scale to 13.7 petabytes (PB) and achieve 60 GB per second (GBps) throughput and five million IOPS in a 4U system that supports OpenStack and Hadoop.

The WOS 360 2.0 object platform is available as software only or on the vendor’s WOS7000 appliance that is tuned for performance with SAS drives. DDN updated its Global Object Assure erasure coding to reduce storageoverhead, and added a high capacity node. The new node holds 96 drives in a 4U enclosure, up from 60 drives in its previous highest capacity node. With 8 TB drives, the appliance scales to 768 TB.

Randy Kerns, senior strategist and analyst at Evaluator Group, said DDN is taking technology developed for HPC and modifying it to move into more mainstream verticals.

“I don’t think the product is the lead here,” he said. “The lead is they are entering into additional markets that they had not focused on previously. They are taking their products from where they have had real success and now taking it into a new customer base.”

Read the full article here.