DDN’s WOS goes 360

It is becoming widely accepted that object storage is the best alternative for managing and getting value from the vast amounts of unstructured data being created by social media and other technologies. That is now putting pressure on the providers of object storage technologies and services to step up to a wider plate that aims to cover all forms of storage management and value-extraction that any business might want to use.

That, according to, DataDirect Networks’ new Chief Marketing Officer, Molly Rector, is one of the core drivers behind the company’s launch of WOS360, a major revamp of its Web Object Scaler technology, which lies at the heart of its object storage capabilities.

This latest version is what the company calls a full-spectrum solution.

“What we didn’t have is a complete storage solution,” Rector said. “We didn’t have archive functionality or compatibility with archiving applications. Other vendors still only focus on different sectors of storage.”

With WOS360, customers will be able to deploy the industry’s most versatile object storage with flexible access choices through the WOS Connect development program.  Whether they operate in one or multiple datacentres around the globe, organisations that require high performance or archive storage will now get low cost, easy-to-manage and vastly scalable object storage.

It provides a broad set of new data protection, archive, collaboration and distribution capabilities designed specifically to meet the five key object storage requirements of customers today: scalability, accessibility, efficiency, reliability and performance.

One of the key developments, offering new scale-out advancements, is Global ObjectAssure. This builds on DDN’s existing data protection schemes and provides customers with very broad data protection capabilities. It operates on the basis of there being one, immutable storage location for all the data, with replication services anywhere in the world, in any form and on any device considered appropriate by the user, provided by replicating the metadata only.

This approach offers several capabilities in terms of operational flexibility and strong compliance and governance controls. For example, by replicating the metadata only, the raw data can be located wherever is best for a business. This means that governance requirements such as data sovereignty – where the location of the data is part of a legislative framework – can be adhered here, while branches of the business around the globe can work with the replicated metadata without breaching compliance rules.

Using the metadata, it therefore becomes possible for users to build collaborative services where other applications can work with the data anywhere in the world without touching it.

In addition, because the raw data is immutable, it is never changed. Any changes that are made as part of a business process are written anew into storage. This has the added side-advantage of creating an operational `snapshot’ capability, allowing businesses to reset back to an earlier known `good’ state in the event of a problem, and even help identify where or when a problem occurred.     

With the preservation, retention and deletion of data a critical requirement, WOS 360 offers the industry’s broadest range of object storage protection schemes, ranging from smart replication to the company’s ObjectAssure erasure coding offerings. Unlike traditional dispersed erasure encoding techniques that limit the choice in number of sites or data protection levels, DDN claims that WOS technology is the only platform that provides local, replicated and globally distributed erasure coding, affording customers full flexibility to select the protection scheme that best meets their needs. Data protection mechanisms are policy-based and can be set up as granularly as per object.

In addition to these latest software and hardware platform updates, the company is also accelerating the growth of its partner ecosystem with a new application integration program called WOS Connect. This partner development program enables seamless integration and compatibility testing with WOS technology, as end users and application providers integrate object storage into their environments.