NAS offerings 'set new industry standards’

The newest product in the DDN GRIDScaler® product family, the GS14K™, delivers the speed and scale that data intensive environments need to accelerate analytics, increase reliability and integrate into modern workflows such as Hadoop, OpenStack and scale-out NAS environments. The GS14K is offered as an All Flash Array or Hybrid Storage platform, delivering the advantages of NAS data access with the high performance benefits of parallel files systems to support today’s modern, big data demands in an economical, easy to manage appliance.  The GS14K revolutionizes the datacenter.

“As compute power increases and high performance workflows quicken the pace of data generation and consumption, traditional NAS and scale-out architectures have fallen behind and don’t deliver the NAS performance required in many key Big Data workflows,” said Molly Rector, CMO and EVP product management and worldwide marketing, DDN. “DDN’s GS14K delivers unrivalled data ingest, access and distribution speeds, and the ability to provide seamless tiering across NVMe, SSD, disk, tape and cloud.  The GS14K raises the bar as the new standard for high performance scale-out NAS solutions. Our unrelenting focus on driving high performance innovation for large scale environments has allowed us to deliver a solution that is faster, denser and easier to manage at scale than any other product in the market.”

The market has been primed for a new generation of scale-out NAS technologies that support data-intensive, high performance big data workflows. Traditional NAS and scale-out NAS solutions were not architected to manage the wide variety of file types nor the diverse storage tiers of today’s workflows.  The relative low performance and limited integration of the storage tiers of these traditional solutions results in equipment sprawl that reduces productivity and increases cost, complexity and risk. Network protocols limit bandwidth into and out of the system – creating workflow bottlenecks - and a lack of integrated data migration tools make archiving, cloud-based collaboration and disaster recovery difficult and highly-manual processes.
 

Leveraging the latest data storage technological innovations such as the fastest SSDs, the latest interconnects, and embedded PCI-e low latency fabric, the DDN GS14K delivers breakthrough performance and capacity.  The GS14K solves the critical performance, cost and management problems of traditional NAS in data intensive environments, providing the capacity growth and speed required by modern big data environments.  Benefits of DDN’s GS14K include:

·       Highest reliability and mixed IO performance with all SSD configurations and hybrid storage offerings.

·       Open source software integration delivering the reliability, performance and ease of support of an Enterprise-grade NAS provider with seamless integration to OpenStack and Hadoop environments.

·       Decouples performance and capacity for complete cost control, better support and lower TCO through its ability to scale up or out. It ingests data at scale, reliably, with room to grow data inputs to the workflow.  

·       Eliminates datacenter sprawl with the industry’s highest capacity per rack. By consolidating multiple data types for ease of access, the GS14K eliminates storage and data silos while reducing management cost, complexity and data risk.

·       Makes large data sets simultaneously available to multiple systems and users with support for Traditional NAS Protocols (CIFS, NFS) plus high performance NAS Client and optional Burst Buffer.

·       Simplifies management by presenting a single, unified data view to users, administrators and applications across over any tier of storage including high performance, active archive, tape and cloud.

·       Open Architecture means faster availability of new technology – EDR InfiniBand, Omni-Connect, NVMe SSDs – and simpler integration with new software tools such as OpenStack SWIFT and Hadoop.

“To be competitive in today’s world of massive data, organizations need to be able to access data from a variety of sources and leverage their data using the highest storage and retrieval performance, efficiency and scalability,” said George Crump, Chief Steward for Storage Switzerland, LLC. “DDN’s GS14K is a solid example of how organizations can keep many of the appliance qualities that led them to choose scale-out NAS in the past, but with the ability to serve today’s commercial Big Data requirements.”