back to article Data Direct Networks prepares to board Amazon S3. It's cutlasses now, lads

Amazon might have its Glacier data archive, but Data Direct Networks, which is in the business of WOS (Web Object Scaler) wizardry, can now store a whole continental ice sheet of data with its trillion-object WOS7000 array. DDN, primarily known for high-performance computing storage, has long said that it would bring out a …

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  1. Buzzword

    It feels wrong to call anything the WOS if it didn't involve Steve Wozniak.

  2. ChaosFreak

    Another Proprietary Box

    Remind me again why I should invest in yet another proprietary hardware architecture when I can just use Open Stack Swift to build Petabytes of cloud storage from commodity drives in commodity enclosures?

    1. TomLeyden

      Re: Another Proprietary Box

      * Because WOS is in the first place a software platform, but our customers happen to like the super fast hardware we make too. We are happy to have a software-only conversation, "Chaosfreak".

      * Because you may be up for a management nightmare if you are running a petabytes infrastructure on commodity hardware & Swift.

      * Because OpenStack isn't necessarily open either: it's as much influenced by vendors as WOS is.

      * Because DDN WOS offers a lot more choices in respect to API's than Swift, so as a matter of fact it is more open, odd as this may sound.

      * Because when you include the integration cost, the management cost and the cost of running a storage cloud on a less than optimal architecture, your TCO will be much higher than that of WOS.

      * Because WOS provides the choice between replication (sync & async), erasure coding and replicated erasure coding.

      * Because WOS is faster: http://www.ddn.com/blog/?p=532

  3. KX1B

    When was the last time you read of a customer breaking ground on a new data center?

    Customers are moving their applications and data to a cloud environment. Unless a customer is considering building out a private or hybrid cloud, there is limited potential for this storage solution. If Nirvanix failed to take marketshare away from S3, what is the key differentiator of DDN's WOS 3.0 that will convince customers to move their data from S3 to WOS and host it in their own cloud?

  4. TomLeyden

    Hi KX1B,

    It's all about scale (and performance, and cost, and reliability). The most important thing we learn about Nirvanix is not about how they failed to take marketshare from Amazon (that was due to bad messaging/marketing/positioning/strategy) but how customers got themselves into the trouble they are having now getting their data off the Nirvanix cloud.

    Their is great benefit in public cloud solutions - especially for compute, application delivery etc. But it's not a safe place for your data, and it is expensive. The DDN customers choose for WOS because of that: once their data sets exceed the 500TB limit we can offer them a serious cost benefit, plus they will never face the problem of suddenly having to take their data off a public cloud service.

    Here is one blog post I wrote about the topic http://www.ddn.com/blog/?p=494

    A Nirvanix-specific post is queued to be posted this week.

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