DataDirect Networks steps up object storage push with WOS refresh

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1 DataDirect Networks steps up object storage push with WOS refresh Analyst: Simon Robinson 10 Jul, 2015 Next month, DataDirect Networks (DDN) will release the latest version of its Web Object Scalar (WOS) product as the HPC specialist continues in its quest to grow its business among large enterprises that struggle with the large-scale requirements of their storage environments. Version 2.0 of DDN's WOS 360 includes a broad range of feature and function updates, as well as new form factors designed to boost its appeal to organizations looking to pack more storage into their datacenter footprint. The 451 Take Over the last year, DDN has been sharpening its focus on what it describes as the 'commercial HPC' market. Although its supercomputing footprint attests to its performance capabilities, this will always remain a finite market. However, with many large organizations now placing new stresses on their storage environments both from a performance and capacity perspective there is undoubtedly an opportunity for DDN to broaden its total available market. Within this, the refreshed WOS continues to be a solid contender for a range of capacity-centric use cases. Although there's no standout feature in particular, the broad nature of the enhancements should continue to ensure DDN's seat at the object-storage table as the market slowly continues to come to life. Context Seventeen-year-old DDN describes itself as the world's largest private storage company. With 2014 revenue of roughly $250m, self-funded DDN says it continues to experience double-digit growth and is profitable. The Santa Clara and Chatsworth, California-based company has about 600 Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 employees in 20 countries worldwide. The company continues to derive much of its business from the HPC sector its storage systems power roughly two-thirds of the world's 100 largest supercomputers. However, DDN also notes growing a presence in other performance-hungry environments; it claims a footprint in half of the largest oil and gas sites, 40% of the leading investment banks, 30% of the largest aero and auto manufacturers and one-third of the top genome-sequencing centers, as well as number of large Web, telco and cloud service providers. Although the vast majority of DDN's sales are for its high-performance storage systems for file systems (for an overview of DDN's product portfolio, see this report), including the Storage Fusion Architecture and Scaler appliances, the company has been courting the object storage market since 2010 with WOS, a technology project it first started developing in Strategy Its progress here has been steady, which is more a reflection of the evolution of the object market than anything else; object storage is a 'big game' space with a relatively small number of large opportunities rather than a volume market. However, DDN believes that the global WOS footprint means it is second only to Amazon's S3 storage service in terms of number of objects stored. It says there are some 225 billion objects stored in WOS systems worldwide (For comparison, AWS said two years ago that there were more than two trillion objects stored in S3. Although it has not updated that number, we can assume that the number has more than doubled since then.) DDN does not disclose specific revenue, customer or deployment numbers for WOS, but says growth has been particularly strong in the last year or so. It notes 250% year-on-year bookings growth for WOS. Although WOS is mostly marketed as a pre-built hardware appliance, DDN says that about half of WOS deployments to date have been software-only, where customers install it on hardware they source themselves. In order to focus on specific opportunities where it believes it thrives, DDN is focused on six use cases for WOS: public/private cloud storage, archiving, content distribution, file sync and share, video streaming, and BYOD. Products We last provided an overview of WOS in March 2014 as the company released WOS 360. Although the product was first released in 2010, this was the first version to feature geo-distributed erasure coding, offering significant efficiency savings for customers that deploy WOS across multiple locations (such as for content-distribution purposes.) The company plans to release WOS 360 v2.0 in August, and the product has been updated across multiple dimensions. From a form-factor Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 perspective, the major addition is a WOS Capacity Appliance that DDN says offers twice the density of rival systems. Aimed at large-scale unstructured data-archiving use cases, the 4U system offers support for up to 96, 8TB SATA HDDs, where DDN's previous capacity appliance had slots for 60, four or six terabyte SAS drives. The new system is 40% cheaper than its predecessor on a dollar/gb basis, DDN says, although it's not disclosing details. WOS 360 v 2.0 also comes with a couple of notable additions on integration front. New is support for the OpenStack SWIFT API; this comes in addition to existing support for Amazon's S3 API. More notably, DDN has embedded both the SWIFT and S3 interface natively into the WOS appliance (or into customers' servers if they have deployed WOS on different hardware), providing applications with direct access instead of via its gateway device. For some customers, this will simplify and reduce the cost of their WOS deployments without compromising availability because any Swift S3 instance will still be able to access any WOS node in the cluster, DDN says. It plans to embed file-system access later this year, although there will likely be performance trade-offs there. Additionally, DDN has improved the efficiency of its Global ObjectAssure feature in the new version. This reduces the storage overhead by 20% (from 1.88x) to as low as 1.5x the original dataset. This is reserved for deep archive use cases where data is infrequently accessed but still supports survive-node failure, site failure and multiple simultaneous drive failures with no data loss or data-access disruption. Finally, the update has improvements in the areas of network security, new data-integrity checks, simplified deployment and maintenance, latency reductions to boost throughput performance for applications such as video streaming and content distribution, and a simplified integration process between WOS and DDN's GridScaler product. Competition The competitive landscape for object storage systems is fairly fragmented, with multiple large players and specialists offering a variety of software-only and embedded hardware systems, and many cloud providers also offering object-based storage services that increasingly support a similar range of applications and use cases. The major players are EMC, which has now refocused its object storage efforts on its Elastic Cloud Storage appliance, and Hitachi Data Systems with the Hitachi Content Platform. NetApp is talking a more aggressive stance in object with its StorageGrid offering. IBM, HP and Dell are all taking partner-centric approaches to object storage, for the time being at least. Most of the noise in the object storage market is being generated by the startup community. There are signs of consolidation here, with Western Digital recently announcing its acquisition of Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 Amplidata which is also focused on very large environments. Other startups and specialists include Cleversafe, Scality, Cloudian and Caringo, while Nexenta recently released its first homegrown object storage platform. Meanwhile, there are at least three open source approaches to object storage: Basho's RIAK CS, OpenStack SWIFT (promoted by HP and startup SwiftStack, among others) and, most notably, Ceph, which is proving popular in OpenStack environments. Ceph is now being promoted most actively by Red Hat, which last year acquired Inktank, the entity set up to drive commercial support around Ceph. Ceph is now being embraced by other ISVs and providers, including SUSE and Fujitsu. Despite this, DDN says it competes with traditional storage approaches including NAS and archiving software as well as large cloud providers (e.g., AWS) as often as it does against other object storage vendors. SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses DDN has been a player in the object storage market for five years, where WOS is a proven and mature platform. The latest updates should expand its appeal across key target use cases. Opportunities Threats DDN has a large presence in the HPC and other performance-hungry environments. Many of these also have large capacity requirements, providing a good cross-sell opportunity for WOS. DDN is still mostly known as a performance player, and the broader market beyond HPC may not be aware of WOS or its capabilities. The object market overall has not yet 'crossed the chasm,' and with relatively few large opportunities, competition can be intense. Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; This report was originally published within 451 Research's Market Insight Service. For additional information on 451 Research or to apply for trial access, go to: Copyright The 451 Group 5