This article discusses some recent announcements in enterprise digital storage from DDN, Panasas, Dot Hill and Nimble Storage, particularly of interest for enabling media and entertainment applications as well as other enterprise applications. Some of these announcements are for products and others are technology announcements.
Data Direct Networks (DDN) released its latest release of its WOS object storage platform that provides new options that serve a number of markets including cloud storage, shared storage, deep archives, video streaming, file sync and share and SaaS. This includes 30% lower cost capacity tier for long-term archiving and 20% greater storage efficiency using Global Object Assure (GOA) erasure coding. The latest product can store close to 800 TB in a 4U array for the deep archive layer.
OpenStack Swift support has been added to existing S3, CIFS, NFS, GPFS, Lustre and native REST interfaces. The product also provides end-to-end security of management data, data in-flight and node-to-node security. DDN says that more than 1 B new objects are added to WOS management each week with 225 B objects currently managed by WOS.
Panasas introduced its ActiveStor 18 product. ActiveStor 18 provides a 33% increase in storage density, 8 TB (using HGST Helium-filled 8 TB HDDs) as well as 4 TB hard disk drive configurations, 20 PB and 200 GB/s scalability in a single global namespace and 19% faster CPU (allowing faster RAID rebuild as well as improved metadata and small file movement) and 2X cache increase (up to 16 GB per storage blade. Each storage blade also has a 480 GB SSD
The Panasas PanFS is the storage operating system and supports the DirectFlow Panasas proprietary protocol as well as NFS v3 for Linux and Unix clients and SMB for Microsoft Windows clients. These products will ship in September 2015 with a list price per GB as low as $1.05. A key market for ActiveStor 18 is rendering to support visual effects, animation and game studios.
Dot Hill was granted a patent on its RealStream high performance software technology. This software provides much raster data ingest (said to be 3X in the company press release), while handling more than 5,000 parallel data streams for heavy-duty Internet traffic workloads. Ingest of content into a storage platform is a common function in media and entertainment although the company said this technology supports specific storage needs of customers in the areas of high-speed network traffic analysis and big data analytics.
Through unique algorithms, RealStream makes it possible to handle more than 5,000 parallel data streams without compromising Quality of Service. A particular target for this product is the growing industrial internet of things (IoT) market where data may come into a network from a variety of dispersed intelligent sensors.
Nimble Storage provides hybrid storage systems that combine flash memory and HDDs into a tiered responsive storage system. According to the company “Nimble Adaptive Flash platform offers a single storage architecture that dynamically caters to the needs of enterprise-wide workloads across performance, capacity, and data protection.” By combining the flash and HDDs into a single integrated system the company says that it can supply a low deterministic latency at a lower cost than all-flash arrays. The product also includes software encryption and REST APIs to support object storage. The product is targeted at a number of enterprise applications.
Storage systems developments are enabling new media and entertainment and other enterprise applications. Products from DDN, Panasas, Dot Hill and Nimble Storage provide combinations of flash memory and HDDs storage, object storage, data encryption and storage management enabling new data center and cloud applications.
