Data Backup Digest

Direct Data Networks, or DDN, first made their mark on the world of hyper-converged storage back in late 2015. Although it’s nearly two years old at the time of this writing, the SFA14Ke, which utilizes DDN’s proprietary Storage Fusion Architecture, is still one of the most efficient appliances available.

Introducing the SFA14Ke

By combining tremendous computational power, advanced networking abilities, scalable storage and device virtualization, the SFA14Ke is also incredibly versatile. Of course it provides all of this functionality, as well as throughput speeds of 60 gigabits per second and 6 million IOPS, within a solitary rack-mounted form.

Molly Rector, chief marketing officer and executive vice president for product management and worldwide marketing with DDN, spoke about the purpose of the SFA14Ke by saying: ''“To solve data growth, companies don't just need higher capacity storage devices or faster networks. They need a way to accelerate data from end to end as it moves through compute into the storage. Typically, you think of hyper-converged systems as being for small organizations, whereas we designed the SFA14K for larger organizations that have large-scale data problems. We have early adopters that are taking this system for a Cinder infrastructure and using Swift to get to our object storage.”

The SFA14Ke was only the first device in the DDN14Ke line of hardware, but it remains one of the most popular. It is scalable to a whopping 13.72 petabytes, which can be achieved using 1,680 HDDs with 8 TBs each and 72 SSDs with 3.84 TB each.

If its virtualization you’re after, the SFA14Ke has you covered, too. The ability to use VMware locally is a huge advantage, and it even supports cloud connectivity via OpenStack Swift. According to DDN, the SFA14Ke can support for more than 100,000 virtual machines running various platforms from VMware, Microsoft or Citrix.

Greater Data Protection

DDN has also added increased data protection for their WOS 360 object-based storage platform. Included in a new product known as WOS Enterprise Protect, the suite offers increased functionality in the way of deduplication, file synchronization, data backup, remote data wiping, data governance and e-discovery.

The added cost of object-based storage is enough to turn many customers away, especially small, startup businesses. However, the team with DDN hopes that the added features in WOS 360 will help justify the cost.

Rector commented on this caveat by saying: “Most IT organizations don't have enough data to justify using object storage. To get the cost-per-gigabyte ratio, you need at least a couple hundred terabytes. The features in Enterprise Protect enable organizations with smaller data sets to take advantage of shared object storage.”''

DDN and the Future of Object-Based Storage and Security

Although they frequently release new hardware and software to the general public, the team with DDN is dedicated to ensuring the longevity of the appliances and utilities that are already in use. They provide regular updates through their website, www.ddn.com, where they also provide comprehensive technical support, partnership data and general information on their company.