DDN updates object storage platform as it aims to break out of HPC niche

Transcription

1 DDN updates object storage platform as it aims to break out of HPC niche Analyst: Simon Robinson 18 Oct, 2013 DataDirect Networks has refreshed its Web Object Scaler (WOS), the company's platform for efficiently storing large amounts of unstructured data. The release of WOS 3 comes as interest in object storage technology for a variety of emerging workloads continues to build, and although overall adoption remains low, DDN believes its latest update can help position it at the vanguard of the object storage movement. The 451 Take The object storage market overall is fascinatingly poised. Adoption is growing, organizations view it as strategic and multiple specialists have demonstrable traction, but overall understanding and awareness have yet to penetrate the broader enterprise IT consciousness. We think this will eventually happen, but exactly when, and in what exact form, remains to be seen. As it stands today, DDN is well positioned with WOS from a technology point of view, but we think the company has some work to do to broaden its capabilities and boost its appeal and awareness beyond its core HPC niche. If DDN really intends to break into the mainstream enterprise as it professes to do then WOS could be a key entry point. Exactly how it plans to do so remains an evolving story. Context DDN first released the Web Object Scaler platform back in Like other object storage systems, it's aimed at addressing use cases that traditional storage systems, such as NAS and SAN, struggle to meet, specifically by efficiently and securely storing large amounts of unstructured data, often Copyright The 451 Group 1

2 across broad geographic distances. Use cases typically include enabling storage as a service/cloud backup, global content collaboration, 'active' archiving, content delivery and 'DVR in the cloud' services. Object storage deployments are mostly concentrated in data-intensive environments and verticals, especially media and entertainment, HPC, satellite imagery, surveillance video, seismic data, medical images, and genomic data. Also like other object platforms, adoption of WOS has been relatively modest to date. DDN claims WOS is the largest platform for object storage after EMC's Atmos, although it isn't disclosing total capacity shipped. In total, there are still fewer than 30 WOS deployments in production today, mostly in HPC and university settings. However, this remains a 'big game' market deal volume is fairly low, but individual implementations can be very large, often involving multiple petabytes of capacity. Disclosed WOS customers include University College London, Samsung, Symantec and the US Department of Defense. So where does WOS fit in DDN's overall portfolio? The company says its offerings address three major types of 'big data': the SFA storage arrays that it is best known for are aimed at big structured/transactional data; its hscaler arrays are aimed at big semi-structured data, including analytics, Hadoop and MapReduce (as such, it is positioned as 'the world's first Apache Hadoop appliance'); and WOS is aimed at big unstructured data, including files, objects and content streams. While we don't believe WOS is a huge revenue generator for DDN today, the company says it expects the system to become a more strategic platform as the volume of file and unstructured digital content that enterprises generate continues to explode, and as object storage grows in appeal. Moreover, DDN believes there is a growing desire for organizations to begin leveraging these content stores in more interesting and valuable ways; it has developed WOS 3 with this in mind. Products WOS is a distributed, scalable peer-to-peer object storage platform that is most often sold as an appliance, bundled with hardware that DDN packages itself (the hardware is all built from commodity components) although customers requiring very large configurations (more than 10PB) are able to buy WOS as a software-only package. DDN says WOS is differentiated in a number of important ways. At its core, DDN says it's the only major object storage platform that doesn't utilize a POSIX file system 'under the covers' in some way, such as to manage data on an individual-node basis. This seemingly small technical point is Copyright The 451 Group 2

3 crucial, DDN says, because storing objects on raw disk means WOS has less overhead to contend with. That boils down to less complexity, higher performance (reduced latency, while reads only require one disk operation, and writes two operations) and no barriers to scale. Significantly, DDN says this architecture also means that WOS can handle both small and large files and objects with high levels of performance; some other object storage systems are good at dealing with large objects, but performance often suffers when handling smaller objects. DDN says this limits the appeal of other platforms, while WOS is suited to a range of applications. The company claims an additional side benefit of this is that WOS offers much higher disk utilization up to 99% of the available capacity versus 75-80% with competing systems. Our previous report on WOS covered a couple of notable new features that DDN included in the last release, including a new local erasure coding feature it calls ObjectAssure. Erasure coding is seen as a more efficient way of protecting data compared with other schemes, such as replicating objects, because it can offer similar levels of protection while consuming less capacity, although there are some trade-offs. WOS doesn't offer distributed erasure coding (i.e., across geographic distance) at this point; instead it combines ObjectAssure with replication to protect data across multiple sites. However, we would expect that this is on its roadmap. DDN has now announced another revision to the WOS platform, with a software update and new hardware and integration options DDN is collectively referring to as 'WOS 3.' The most notable addition on the software side is a new search and indexing feature that allows up to five fields of user-defined metadata to be indexed and searched. DDN says WOS is the first object storage platform to support high-performance search in this manner, meaning that users can run detailed searches to highlight individual objects or groups of objects without having to use a separate application (such as irods in the genome space). Metadata is stored along with the objects, which are then distributed across the nodes, meaning searches across massive data stores can be performed in parallel extremely quickly. Meanwhile, DDN also announced new hardware for WOS. As with most hardware refreshes, the WOS7000 Platform includes more memory, processing and capacity, offering up to 2.5PB of capacity in a single rack through the use of 4TB HDDs. Finally, a new bridging capability allows customers to connect DDN's GridScaler with WOS, allowing them to use WOS as a back-end archive or DR repository for GridScaler data. The bridge initially supports GPFS environments only, but will expand to include other systems and environments in the future. Copyright The 451 Group 3

4 Competition As we noted in our recent spotlight report, the market for object storage is becoming more interesting as a small, but increasingly well-funded ecosystem of specialists looks to take advantage of growing interest levels. Granted, object storage is still very much a niche technology overall, but those companies that recognize a requirement for object storage tend to invest in the technology in a significant way. DDN's main rivals, from a functionality and positioning perspective, are relatively small specialists, including Cleversafe, Amplidata and Scality. The company notes that, in reality, it tends to compete most often with EMC, which has a growing array of object capabilities, including Centera, Atmos and the new ViPR product, which offers object storage as its first 'data service.' Additionally, the OpenStack ecosystem is building around the SWIFT object storage capability. As specialists such as SwiftStack as well as those promoting open source alternatives to SWIFT, such as Ceph/Inktank and Basho become more adept at packaging functionality, as well as leading development in areas such as erasure coding, this could become a more significant competitive threat over time. From a differentiation perspective, DDN highlights many of the architectural points discussed above, which it claims translate into better performance across a broader range of use cases and object/file sizes. When competing against smaller specialists, it also highlights that WOS is just one product in a range of 'big storage' offerings that can meet a range of requirements and increasingly are better-integrated. With that said, there are a couple of notable gaps in the WOS feature list. The first, as mentioned, is support for distributed erasure coding, which we would expect the company to be working on. The second is support for the OpenStack SWIFT API, which we also expect is on its roadmap, although the company believes its own native WOS API offers richer functionality. It is working to integrate WOS with ecosystem applications in areas such as backup and archiving (current partners here include CommVault and ASG Atempo). SWOT Analysis Strengths Weaknesses The WOS platform has already experienced a level of success in some large environments, suggesting that DDN's strong claims about the product have some proof points in the market. WOS has a couple of notable functional gaps at this point, although these are unlikely to be impeding its business in a major way today, and are likely on its roadmap. Copyright The 451 Group 4

5 Opportunities Threats DDN is already well known for its storage system capabilities especially in the HPC space and many organizations here are early adopters of object storage. Aside from the growing competitive landscape, another challenge for DDN is that it is not really known either outside of the HPC space or for its software smarts. Copyright The 451 Group 5

6 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 6