Current Overview
On September 18, 2013, DataDirect Networks announced its new Web Object Scaler (WOS) 3.0 software, along with its WOS7000 object storage appliance. Neuralytix believes that
DataDirect Networks has demonstrated WOS as one of the industry’s most matureobject storage solutions in the market today.
Object storage, or, as Neuralytix defines it, Object Addressable Storage (OAS) represents the most contemporary approach to storage systems, and easily provides the most flexible and agile storage architectures available on the market today.
While OAS provides the most granular level of addressing data objects, it is not an easy solution to put together from the vendor perspective. Given the flexible addressing mechanism available in OAS, the first question that is often levied by prospective users is about reliability. With over five years of development and in-field proof, DataDirect Networks has demonstrated that the WOS solution is reliable.
From the user perspective, taking full advantage of OAS is not easy either. Only applications that are written to take advantage of the extended metadata available in OAS can yield the full benefit of OAS.
DataDirect Networks has put together an impressive ecosystem around the WOS solution. These ecosystem partners span key verticals and industries.
Neuraspectiveâ„¢
There are not many fully independent stand-alone object based storage systems available in the market today. WOS and EMC’s Atmos stands out as the two most prominent OAS solutions available today on the market.
DataDirect has managed to penetrate the storage cloud, document collaboration, seismic and satellite data, and content delivery network (CDN) with WOS.
The problem with OAS is that it is has not been adopted in the mainstream as quickly as it should have. There are many reasons for this, including the need for enterprise applications to be updated to write to the APIs of OAS. Over the last several years, Amazon’s S3 interface has come out as a more dominant API for addressing OAS systems (although, S3, in and to itself is not a storage system!)
What does this really mean in the whole scheme of things?
What WOS brings to enterprises is a true on-premise storage-as-a-service offering. OAS can be the underpinning of a value generating, competitive advantage creating infrastructure. Like other OAS, what WOS needs is to have more partners in the ecosystems – in particular, independent software vendors (ISVs).
Given that DDN was one of the first to come out with a true OAS, it has come a long way, and has already signed up many ISVs, but it needs to continue to do more. Additionally, WOS would act as a perfect front-end (not a gateway, but a front-end) to the multitudes of existing storage systems that lack object capabilities.
Although WOS is known for its large capacities, it could, and in Neuralytix’s opinion, should be deployed in many progressive mid-market customers. These customers can leverage the object addressability in conjunction with Big Data solutions to perform discovery, machine learning, pattern matching, etc. across all its datasets to generate new revenue and profit opportunities.
Neuralytix also believes that more cloud service providers (CSPs) should look at the WOS system as an alternate storage backend infrastructure as it will give CSPs a much needed differentiating abstraction layer for their customers.
Overall, we believe that this generation of WOS is DDN’s most mature, and represents a solution from a company that is dedicated towards producing a solution that provides the data storage solution aligned with the convergent and dynamic data center infrastructure that the IT industry is proclaiming as ideal and optimal.